This past weekend, I spent some time downloading and installing my "must-have" software on the new laptop.
Without further ado, here's my software baseline for additional free and open-source software for Windows XP SP3, in no particular order.
Adobe Reader 10 to display PDF files
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 (only because IE 6 is standard with XP SP3)
Adobe Flash Player 11 (IE) to display Flash content in IE
Firefox 7.0.1 web browser
Adobe Flash Player 11 (non-IE) to display Flash content in Firefox
Google chrome web browser
Crimson Editor is an excellent text and program editor. Only thing it's missing is viewing text files in hexadecimal.
Thunderbird 7.0.1 email and news reader
Cygwin power tool to give you a bash (Unix) shell and commands under Windows.
Pidgin multi-protocol instant mesage client
PuTTY SSH and telnet client
FileZilla file transfer protocol client
Microsoft Windows Media Player 11 (Requires Windows Genuine Advantage validation)
OpenOffice 3.3 word processor/spreadsheet/presentation/database suite
AVG Anti-virus antiviral software
Ccleaner optimizer and cleaner
Defraggler disk defragmenter
Recuva file recovery tool
Speccy system information tool
WinMerge file comparison and merge utility
I don't think I'm missing anything, but I might have.
What's on your must-have software list that I don't have?