Remnantmods

I tried to include as man free and preferably free and Open Source programs as I could. You guys should really at least look at Anki and X.Flux if you haven't heard of them before, they're both really nice and I'm glad I stumbled across them. I put the link to DreamSpark in the IDE thing so those who are students or have access to a .edu email can get a free version of Visual Studio Professional from Microsoft if they want.

Web Browser - Google Chrome
Office Suite - Libre Office
Studying Software - Anki (Awesome electronic flashcard program, can download and share decks of flashcards)
FTP - WinSCP (Filezilla is good too)
IDE - Free Visual Studio Professional Edition(Legal) (Sharpdevelop and Notepad++ are good to)
Dynamic Screen Brightness Adjuster - X.Flux (Adjusts screen temperature settings based on time of day - On linux Redshift is better)
Version Control/Collaboration - TortoiseSVN

So what programs are your guys main ones or just ones you think are cool and less well known?

Programming - Microsoft Visual C# 2008 Express Edition (Not a student, so I'll use this )
I also use Google Chrome on my desktop. (Unfortunately, I have to run IE at work. Our web based data uses an IE specific call)

Had Linux Mint running dual-boot on my laptop, until Windows crashed and I lost my dual boot after reinstalling Windows. Now it's just hiding in the depths of my hard drive. If you're looking for an alternative OS, I loved it. I just don't recommend dual-booting (escpecially along with Sleep/Hibernate modes)
http://www.linuxmint.com/

Also,
Anti-Virus - http://free.avg.com/
Codecs - http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffdshow/
Old DOS Game support - http://www.dosbox.com/

There's a few anyways.

Yeah I love linux mint, I had a dual boot of Mint 8 and Windows 7 a while back and I'm about to set up 10 in dual boot with 7. If you really like getting down and dirty with linux you should check out arch, but you have to configure basically everything yourself. You should check out the extension IE tab or something for chrome(I know there's something like this for Firefox too), it actually uses IE for the pages you need, not sure how it would work though if your job is stuck on IE6 or anything though like a lot of big businesses.

For keeping an eye on my computers temperatures I use HWMonitor.
http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

For setting graphics card fan speeds I use EVGA Precision. All my graphics cards will run at +90C if I don't manually set the fan speed. This program allows you to adjust the fan speed curve so you can tell it to run at 100% if your temps ever get that high.
http://www.evga.com/precision/