9 GNU Emacs is a great and wonderful program, and since ever little thing is scriptable, the possibilies are truely endless. Right now the only thing I do not like about the program is the fact that they do not provide binaries for GNU Emacs 23, which makes it fairly difficault to get running on my flash drive.

This program has become so important in my daily computer use that "packing" happens to include making sure the latest stable release is running off of my drive properly.

Anyone serious about prorgamming, or anyone who ever wants to truely extend the use of a program that they use often should look into this program immediately.

Some people may call this program un-needed, or even archaic, but I really feel sorry for those people because they are missing out on the only program they may ever really need.

---- Praise the Saint IGNUcius!

10 A very effective and powerful photoshop replacement.
I've yet to see anything that can be done in any leading 2D graphics program that can not be done with the GIMP.

9 Blender is a wonderful 3D modeling and animation program. I've used all of the main commercial products out there, and none of them compare to how this program gives you the ability to control the objects your working with, in about an eighth of the hard drive space.

10 A great and highly flexible and fairly standards compliant web browser.
I've yet to see a better browser, and chances are I never will.
With the final release of Firefox 3.0, with many new features and a smaller memory footprint, I would recommend this over just about any other program.

9 Pidgin is a great multi-protocol IM client with many great features that will make the use of official clients a nightmare.
The only problem I have with it is that the developers lately have pissed off a lot of user by not adding a very simple option to disable one of the things they've added to the program. Past that, I've yet to use a better IM client.