The following page lists a number of softwares available for free, which I have tested and find very useful and complete. There are several sites out there that lists and rates good free software. The one that I find most useful is www.snapfiles.com.
CD/DVD Burning Tools
CD Burner XP Pro is a powerful CD/DVD burning tool, which supports features such as Audio-CD (from wav, mp3, wma), ISO-files, Data-CDs, DVDs etc. Further, it has good support for ripping Audio-CDs to wav, mp3 and wma files. However, the current version lacks support for a CD copy function.
Image Viewers
FastStone Image Viewer is an image browser, converter and editor that can handle most features and formats you ever wanted. It reduces the need of Photoshop in many circumstances.
Multimedia players
Winamp is a very popular player which can play and view almost any music and video format. However, if you want a very tight player, which requires minimal resources and only have the most fundamental features, I recommend the player STM MP3 Player.
MP3 tools
Audiograbber is a simple tool for ripping your audio-CDs to MP3 files. It has integrated support for downloading disc information from freedb and supports various MP3 encoders.
Open Office
OpenOffice is a free software that is now both stable and complete office package, which can replace the MS Office suite. Now, opening and saving Microsoft Powerpoint- and Excel-files seems to work really good. Handling of MS Word files has been improved dramatically in version 2.0, however there seems to be some parts where it cannot handle the formats correctly.
PDF tools
CutePDF Writer is a free software which makes it possible to create PDF files from any Windows program. It is simple and powerful.
FTP
FileZilla is a powerful and yet simple to use ftp client that supports normal FTP and SFTP.
File eraser
Eraser is a tool which can erase files and unused disk space. It is reliable and integrates seamless into the Windows environment.
File Encryption
Axcrypt is a very simple but powerful tool, where you can encrypt files on your hard drive. To update or change a file that is encrypted, simply click on the file, and you will be prompted with a pass phrase. After changing the file, Axcrypt will automatically encrypt the file again.