We should have a sticky for software that peple have found that is free, in that no money changes hands.... perhaps a registration process, but nothing hard.
Ill start with what I believe to be the best products for free that a user running Windows XP would benefit from.
Antivirus -
http://www.activevirusshield.com. Rebranded Kaspersky 6.0 with some of the extended features taken out but scans email, files and screens spyware/malware.
Firewall -
http://download.zonelabs.com/bin/free/1230_zl/zlsSetup_65_737_000_en.exe Israeli company that produces an excellent piece of firewall software.
Disk backup/imaging - Paragon Drive Image 8.0 SE
http://ftp.paragon.eu.com/Nastya/DB8SE.zip - Cut down version of their for sale product which allows for live imaging to local disk *requires registration (name, surname, email address and country)*.
HDTune - Hard drive diagnostics and benchmarking -
http://www.hdtune.com - Excellent for finding out more about your hard disk(s) Temperature, features and loads more about your drives performance and status.
VideoLAN - Media playback software (DVD etc) -
http://www.videolan.org - Great software for playing DVD movies if you cant be arsed to stump up the 3 quid for PowerDVD
PDF creation -
http://www.primopdf.com/There are loads more and Ill add them as I remember them.
Thats just to start you off, if you want to add to this and make it a sticky, then great as Im sure that alot of people could benefit from it.
Cheers
Tongy