4. FastStone Capture is my favorite screenshot program. Apart from capturing windows (including scrolling ones), regions, or the full desktop, FastStone has an excellent built-in editor that handles text overlays, watermarking, highlighting, cropping, resizing, and more. There's also a screen magnifier and eyedropper tool.

5. AVI Screen does a good job at capturing screencasts for sharing on video sharing sites like YouTube. Its mouse tracking feature is very slick, and is a good way to keep video sizes small. You may need to download it from this page.

6. CamStudio may be a better option for tutorial-style screencasts. In addition to capturing activity, it can also add captions and add picture-in-picture overlays.

7. IrfanView has a number of useful features. It's a great image viewer and it also handles batch conversions. Basic editing tools are included as well, like resize, crop, rotate, sharpen, and blur.

8. The Gimp is my choice for more complex photo editing tasks. The 2.6 interface is a big improvement over older versions, and now that I've taken the time to really learn it I don't miss Photoshop at all.

9. WinHTTrack creates offline copies of websites, which is very useful if you need to cache some pages for reference so that you can work without internet access. Make sure you grab the .zip and not the .exe.

10. The Sage is an excellent portable resource for writers. It's a fully searchable dictionary and thesaurus with over 200,000 definitions. Everything is fully cross-referenced: if there's a word you need to look up in a definition, just click it. The Sage can even handle anagram searches.

11. Sumatra PDF or Foxit Reader are must haves. If you have to follow a style guide, chances are good that it was provided to you as a PDF. Foxit and Sumatra are both small and fast, and support important features like annotations and bookmarking.

If you're a blogger or writer and I missed one of your favorites, share it with us in the comments!