All of the following programs are free. When restrictions apply, I included them in the comments. In my opinion, each and every one of the following programs deserves five stars, on a scale from 1-5.

StarOffice (www.sun.com/staroffice) - Word Processor, Spreadsheet, presentations. Can open and save MS-Office documents, including Office 2000.

HardCopy (www.hardcopy.de) - Excellent screen Capture, and graphics conversion, program.

PowerArchiver (www.powerarchiver.com) - Compression / Decompression in several popular formats. The latest version, 7.0, however, is no longer freeware. See if you can get an older version somewhere (from the license agreement: "The SOFTWARE may be freely distributed provided that it is not modified...")

Programmer's File Editor (www.lancs.ac.uk/people/cpaap/pfe) - NotePad substitute. Main advantages: 1) overcomes the file size limit, 2) MDI (multiple documents in a simple "task").

Opera (www.opera.com) This browser is much better than Internet Explorer. Regrettably, some Web pages are not fully compatible, since they are only tested for IE. Therefore, keep IE handy for incompatible pages (including the - otherwise excellent - UT).

Seagate Analysis (www.seagatesoftware.com/products/seagateanalysis) Let your users create personalized reports and data cubes (analysis based on variable criteria).

Perforce (www.perforce.com) Replacement for Visual SourceSafe (source control and version control). Free for 1 or 2 developers.

Font Viewer (www.pcmag.com/article/0,2997,s%253D1478%2526a%253D5292,00.asp) Very handy if you have hundreds of fonts. Lets you filter by several criteria, for instance, only TrueType + fixed size fonts.

DLExpert (www.yanew.com/english.htm) Resumen broken downloads. Unlike other download assistants, this one doesn't seem to be spyware-sponsored (see below, next entry).

Ad-Aware (www.lavasoftusa.com or www.lavasoft.de) Detects and cleans spyware programs - programs that send personal information from your computer, often without your knowledge - including popular programs like Go!Zilla and GetRight. A detailed analysis of spyware is available at http://grc.com/downloaders.htm. Antivirus programs don't currently detect spyware.