A free web browser that is rapidly displacing Microsoft Internet Explorer (but not rapidly enough!). Web programmers like myself get very frustrated with Internet Explorer because it is the only browser that blatantly disregards many of the important standards set by the W3C. Firefox is standards-conpliant, and is also a lot more customizable.

Firefox Extensions:

Tired of PDF files taking forever to load? Use Foxit and (I am not exaggerating here) they will load almost instantaneously. Super small, super fast program to replace the super large, super slow Adobe Reader.

A free office suite. Open Office has programs equivalent to other (very expensive) office suites (such as Microsoft Office) which include a word processor, spreadsheet program, slide-show program, database program, drawing program, math program, and a few others.

My favorite of the all-in-one instant messengers. It covers AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, IRC, and maybe some others too. Very easy to use and organize, and very easy to skin.

A very intuitive and simple FTP client.

By far the best packet sniffer and protocol analyzer out there.

Security Tools

Graphics Software

Sound and Music Tools

CD Tools

Free online forums. They take care of all the hosting and software stuff, leaving you to manage only the important stuff, like how things look and what options are enabled. An online forum is a great way to coordinate communicaiton between a group of people over the internet. Proboards is highly customizable, and the support people are great. I've been running a Proboards forum for several years now, and I have never had a single complaint.

Google's free email service. G-Mail is the best free (or non-free for that matter) mail service offered online. Check your mail from anywhere. Easy to organize, and comes with a great spam filter and other useful tools. It can even check your other email addresses for you, and send mail from them, so that you can maintain multiple addresses without having to check multiple sites!

Make your own website for free! Free hosting and free tools to let you drag and drop everything into place. I've used Geocities several times, and it really is a great service.

Easy, free image hosting that doesn't require you to register an account. Want to post a picture on a forum, email, or website, but don't have some place to put it? Image Shack is for you!

Web-based instant messenger client covering AIM, Yahoo, Google Talk, and MSN. No download required. Great for using instant messenger from a computer you don't own.

A great website providing all sorts of free DNS services in one convenient place.

A huge repository of free resources for website building and other exploits. GRSites has everything from textures to clipart to fonts. It also has several tools to combine its different resources into buttons and banners and the like, which can save you a ton of time. Easy to navigate and very few ads compared to other sites like this.

Lots of ads and somewhat hard to navigate, but this is one of the few sites that actually offers a decent selection of free clipart.

Tons of free web buttons.

A huge repository of excellent free (and some non-free) fonts.

Graphical (not just one color) fonts, mostly ripped from video games.

Great source for free icons.

Another good source for free icons.

Large library of free sound effects.

This is the hosting service I use. It is very affordable and comes with a great set of website tools. The support team is great. But best of all (and this is why I use them), each account gives you a 'Virtual Private Server.' That means you can log in remotely to your server and use it just like a Unix shell account. You can run programs (Java and other) on your server. This feature is huge, and almost no other hosting companies will allow you to do this. The ones that will cost up to 100x more than WestHost, whose plans start as low as about $4 a month. I have been absolutely thrilled with this company in every regard and recommend it to anyone.

Not exactly 100% free, but it might as well be. This is web hosting for a one time fee. That's right... it's not $3 a month or $3 a year... it's $3 one time, and then you have web hosting forever. That's exponentially cheaper than any other company I have ever seen, and it comes with a lot of great features including unlimited MySQL databases and plenty of daily bandwidth and disk space.