Fresh Windows Install? Programs list

In no particular order. If it's free, it's a link to it. If not, you can be resourceful

UNFINISHED still. Also, this is targeted mainly at XP, since I don't use Vista/7.

Screen Recording
Camstudio (desktop etc, NOT games)
Fraps for game recording

CD Ripping, Music Conversion / Management
CDex - CD ripping
dBPowerAMP Music Converter for converting between formats. Go to the codec central area for extra codecs
MP3 Tag Tools for managing ID3 tags
SUPER - More newbie video encoding/converting
MediaCoder - Advanced video converting (unfortunately somewhat spam-ware now)

Codecs
CCCP Codec pack to get playing every video file out there up to speed
Quicktime Alternative and Real Alternative - This and CCCP = perfect playback support in DirectShow

Media Playing
VLC and Media Player Classic Home Cinema for playing videos.
Winamp 2.95 for music. [placeholder for plugin/skin pack]

Piratan/Downloading
uTorrent - torrents of course
Cabos - If you MUST use gnutella (network limewire uses) then use this client
Songr - Tool that queries mp3 search engines to find music you want, you will fall in love

System Management
Defraggler - Don't use that piece of crap windows defragger, this is better.
QT Tab bar - Like firefox's tabs? Wish windows explorer did that? Then get this.
Bandwidth Meter - Keep track of your bandwidth usage
Taskbar Shuffle - drag and drop your taskbar items to rearrange them
TeraCopy - Replace the default file copy system with this. Tired of a 5,000 item copy stopping because of ONE problem with ONE file? Get this.
CCleaner - Tidy up crap that accumulates.
TweakUI - Customise many nuances, lots of other good tools on that page too
XP-Antispy - ignore the shitty name, it's got some nice tweaks and edits, it's similar to tweakUI above

System Management - Information
Speedfan - Monitor temperatures and in some cases control fan speeds.
PC Wizard - The grand daddy of system info tools.
CPU-Z - CPU Info
GPU-Z - GPU Info


Editing, Reading, Opening, Formats
Sumatra - PDF Reader
Audacity - Audio Editing
Notepad++ - Advanced text editing, syntax hilighting

can I recommend OpenOffice? I know my PC shipped with a copy of Microsoft Office, but it was a trial version and I can't edit anything in them.

Here's the link. http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US

i don't use as many as those but i can recomment

Foxit reader for PDF's - http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/

Sandboxie - http://www.sandboxie.com/

Foobar2000 - http://www.foobar2000.org/ (I only use this when i want to be nice to RAM)