There are a few free Windows applications that I use (some more frequently than others) and thought I would share with anyone interested. More often than not these applications are open-source, for those who are into that sort of thing.

The GIMP - or the GNU Image Manipulation Program is an excellent digital painting, photo-editing, etc program. I doubt that I'll ever go back to Photoshop, even if I had hundreds of dollars to blow.

Inkscape - vector graphics software similar to Adobe's Illustrator. While not sporting the full feature-set of a commercial package, I have had no complaints with it so far.

VideoLAN - my favorite media player. I've never run across a file that VLC won't play. Plus, it can also be used as a streaming server, which is just about the coolest thing I've ever seen a media-player do...

NVU - a web-authoring application that offers WYSIWYG editing, tabbed views, and built-in FTP for file management, just to name a few. Nvu is based on the Mozilla layout engine code and so is fast and has a small memory footprint. The link actually points to a project by John Haller called Portable NVU for use on USB drives, because I've had a lot of difficulty getting the official NVU Windows installer to work. Actually, this project may be dead, but the program is still a great free web editor.

AbiWord - so you just want to write something? Well, how about a free word-processor that installs under 40MB of data, uses less than 6MB of memory, and supports just about every document file-type you can find. The only problem I have with it is the lack of a reliable grammar-check function.

Gnumeric - a spreadsheet app with, as far as I can tell, all of the functionality of Excel plus a few extras like XML file formats and over a 150 worksheet functions "unique to Gnumeric". But yeah, it's basically spreadsheets for free.

Planner - a project management tool for planning, scheduling, and tracking projects, and a free alternative to Microsoft Project. Chances are not many people have a use for this sort of thing, but this type of software is a brilliant resource for mod teams.

WinMerge - a text-file differencing and merging tool. WinMerge is incredibly useful in discovering changes in project files that have been edited by multiple team-members.

WinSCP - an SFTP client that uses SSH. It also integrates with Windows context-menus and can perform batch file scripts through the command-line.

Blender - a 3D graphics application with very modest system requirements. Blender allows for modelling, animation, rendering, and post-production, as well as many other features. Also, there is a very large and active Blender community offering numerous resources and tutorials.

Avid Free DV - I admit that I've used this program the least, but hey, it's a free non-linear digital video editor. Be warned, as far as I can tell it's not supported by Avid and is seriously complex. Another interesting NLE that I haven't used yet is Jahshaka, which is an open source project.

ConTEXT - a small but very powerful text editor. It's packed with features, but some of the more useful are tabbed editing, syntax highlighting for over 200 different programming & scripting languages (and you can create your own), record & execute macros, and user-definable execution keys. Actually, ConTEXT and the Borland command line compiler were my C/C++ development environment of choice through college.

Well, that's it for me... But if there are any interesting free (open-source or otherwise) applications that you use, let me know about them. I'd love to try them out.