Real Player | | Winzip | | Gozilla I recomend The Microsoft Internet Explorer or NetScape Communicator.
ICQ is my favorite, and probably the most popular, chat progam out there. ! Alexa is pretty good. It gives you information about the website you are currently viewing such as ways to contact, who made the site, reviews, trafic...
CuteFtp is really easy to use as opposed to other FTP programs as all you have to do is drag and drop.
Another good download is Napster . It is in a vicious lawsuit and may disappear soon but I am confident that there is nothing that the gov't can do about it. If they manage to take out Napster then there'll just be more poping up elsewhere. The US gov't tried to ban pornography too. Look what happened.
I think that no modern internet computer should be without a firewall. ZoneAlarm is one that operates in Windows and is very easy to setup and use.
Another program that I like is Seti@home . It works as a screensaver and helps some scientists search for extra terrestrial intellegence but it just looks cool.