Internet Browsing: Mozilla/Firefox/Opera
Word processing: OpenOffice.org
Text editing: Notepad/Wordpad
Audio Playing: Winamp
Ripping/encoding: don't really rip stuff
Burning: don't really burn stuff anymore either
Video playing: Media Player Classic
Instant Messaging: YM/MSN
Filesharing: Azureus mainly, BCDC++ too
FTP: don't have any one program - they're all crap in Windows
Virus Scanning: Mcafee, though I leave that disabled 99% of the time since I don't really need the CPU overhead of it - I'm careful enough to not get infected in the first place so I'm not worried
Spyware detection: I don't bother usually, don't need to again I sound overly confident of myself, don't I?
Software Firewall: Tiny Personal Firewall - more to block apps on my PC accessing out to certain things rather than the other way round to be honest.
File Archiving: WinRAR


Joel: Zonealarm is free, but when the TrueVector service it installs eventually dies and gobbles up 100% CPU cycles, don't say you weren't warned of a system reinstall being imminent