Essential Programs 1: Essentials B

() System Measurements: Rainmeter
This program is a bunch of meters. It has a plug-in architecture that allows you to measure anything you want, but I find plug-in writing... very time-consuming, though I wrote some that I use. Most importantly, it does all the measurements of the task manager. However, it stays on your desktop and you can (somewhat) easily configure the appearance. I admit that this kind of slows down the system and isn't all that necessary... but... I can't help but use it because it looks cool. I have a key combination that pops it up on the screen for me. Here's a snapshot of my set-up:. And here's some skins.
() Skin Set I use. It's a modification of other skins that I found.
() Original Ayuka Skin in English
() Original To Heart 2 Skin
() Good weather set

() MP3 Player: Winamp
Okay, I really have no good reason for using this other than it was my first MP3 player. My wife prefers the Windows Media Player, and most people use iTunes now (it seems)... but, I stick with winamp. I don't really configure it at all (I have four different playlists and make sure breaks between songs are clear). All I use it for is listening to MP3s, which I can queue (but so can everything else). Well, although I don't strongly recommend it, I've never been dissatisfied with it, so that is that. I use an old kare-kano skin for it because I haven't spent any time looking for new ones. But it is really annoying that winamp does not internally support Unicode (or any other kind of language support).

() Anti-Virus: NOD32
This is not free at all, but it's the best Anti-Virus program I know of. It catches a lot of stuff Norton and Symantec don't catch, and that doesn't seem to happen the other way around. Anyways, you can search for free anti-virus programs if the cost for such an important program is an issue (but in that case, why are you using xp instead of a unix-like system?)

() Anti-Spyware: AD Aware
Not that good, but it gets rid of spyware. I'm currently looking for a replacement to this.

() Registry Cleaner: RegCleaner
Based on what I've seen, I believe that cleaning the registry helps. This is the best free registry cleaner that I've found and I've read it has one of the lower chances of messing things up. Lots of people suggest the general tool CCleaner to me, but I don't like it as much.

() FTP Client: Filezilla
A simple to use FTP Client that has all the features you'd expect. It's also completely free, which is a huge plus to me.

() Cygwin
Umm... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygwin. Either you need at and have it, or you have no idea what you'd do with it. I guess there's that slim chance you need it and haven't heard of it... but... well, just read up.