Here are some other great open source apps I use on Windows:

• Audacity for sound editing

• WinSCP for secure file transfers

• GIMP for image editing

• Gaim for instant messaging

• X-Chat 2 for IRC

• VideoLAN for video playback (plays DVDs too!)

• nmap for port scanning

• Ethereal for packet sniffing (my {deity}, I love this program!)

• PDFCreator to print any program�s files to PDF

• TightVNC for remote control of other systems (& remote control of my Windows box)

• GnuPG for encryption

• Cygwin for a real Linux command line inside Windows

• Rename-It! for batch renaming of files (love this program!)

• WinDirStat for finding out what�s eating up all my hard drive space

• Azureus for BitTorrent downloads

• eMule for Peer2Peer file sharing

• 7-Zip for archiving & unarchiving files

Whew! And that�s just a start! But it�s true - I use all of those programs regularly, and they�re all fantastic. And best of all, they haven�t cost me a penny (although I have voluntarily donated to several projects, and you should too).

For more great suggestions on open source software for Windows, see �The OSSwin project: Open Source for Windows!� I guarantee you�ll find lots of things there that you�ll just love.

And what about you? What are your favorite open source apps for Windows? Leave us a comment & let us all know!

(Check out all my postings on Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, Gaim, VNC, & Azureus.)

More recomend softwares (collect from user comments of this post)

1. Freemind, a Java mindmapping program.

2. Another project that bundles FLOSS for Windows is TheOpenCD project:

http://www.theopencd.org/ 

3. Any recommendations for CD burning or DVD burning software on Windows that is FLOSS? SF's OSSwin site does have a listing of burning software:

http://osswin.sourceforge.net/#cdwriting

but most don't seem to be ready for the casual user, i.e. something equivalent to K3B on Linux:

http://www.k3b.org/ 

4. The more I am forced to use Windows, the more grateful I am that there's a Vim port for it.

If you use GnuPG on Windows, check out WinPT, a nice GUI front-end. Makes managing lots of keys a little easier.

Other indispensible software?

GsView - Ghostscript Viewer. Not as feature-full as Acrobat Reader (and, frankly, pretty ugly) but FAST!

I hear lots of people talk about Cygwin. I never really understood why Microsoft's own unix environment (Services for Unix) never really took off in the geek sector. It's FREE, provides a full POSIX environment (NOT an emulation layer like Cygwin), and there's plenty of entities out there supporting it. You can use the NetBSD package collection, the ports from InteropSystems, you can even get a pretty decent X Server called X-Desktop (KDE on Win, anyone?).

I like Cdex for ripping CDs in a hurry, honestly haven't found anything quite as nice on Linux (that includes Grip). I also really like EAC, which I think is Win-only as well. I also use open-source SHN and FLAC codec tools.

Plenty of little command-line tools have windows ports that can make your day a lot easier: grep, lynx, PDFTK (if you work with PDFs regularly, you NEED this). The list goes on and on....

5. Dont forget putty ssh client (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/) . I am not sure about the license but it is basically freeware and is the best ssh client I know of.

6. Filezilla is really great for those that still use FTP.

http://filezilla.sourceforge.net/

7. Yes, but most of them are ported from open source operating systems.

Personally, I don't have my favorite open source software for Windows, as I use GNU/Linux (Gentoo). But I remember from my "Windows age" that I used PuTTY (SSH client), WinSCP (SCP/SFTP client) and The GIMP.

8. Nice list of Open Source stuff. Although TightVNC is a great VNC program, I have found that UltraVNC has more features that I like such as File Transfer, Chat, and Encryption of Traffic. Just take a look at UltraVNC as a n alternative to TightVNC.

9. Use Notepad2 instead of Notepad and have a life!

10. I second, third, and fourth cygwin. You can practically emulate a full FOSS environment there. Most of the tools I would list here separately (wget/curl, perl, OpenSSH) are already included.

gvim is always handy. gaim replaces all my IM clients (there's even a nice Sametime plugin). And let's not forget OpenOffice.org.

11. gimp is a great open source image editor but if you just want a great open source image *viewer* try "imgv" (http://imgv.sf.net/) it runs in windows, linux, bsd, osx and more

12. http://shareaza.sourceforge.net/Its an amazing p2p application. It uses multiple networks so you get lots of files. It even opens torrent files.

13. KeePass Password Safe -- Efficient & has better features than anything else http://keepass.sourceforge.net/

PeerGuardian 2 -- Works in the background, takes up almost no resources/CPU and updates itself. http://www.methlabs.org/

Notepad++ -- Quick, markup for just about any language. Gread notepad replacement. http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm

14. ClamAV -- Open Source AntiVirus. 'Nuff said. http://sourceforge.net/projects/clamwin/ or

GnuWin32 -- Cygwin without the need for additional libraries. Turns the DOS commandline
into something useful. http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32/

And finally, a kick-a** online multiplayer game. Armegetron Advanced -- Lightcycles from Tron http://sourceforge.net/projects/armagetronad/

15. Just to mention an alternative to using OpenOffice is using Abiword for wordprocessing and Gnumeric for spreadsheet work. Gnumeric in particular has a great reputation as the spreadsheet the experts use. It used to be only Linux but just recently has been ported to Win32. Both of these apps are significantly more responsive than the corresponding OpenOffice apps. Of course there is more to OpenOffice than wp and spreadsheets but these cover the big two.

Abiword:
http://www.abisource.com

Gnumeric:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric 

16. Great list - I also use many of those programs. I might add HTML-Kit html editor (http://www.chami.com/html-kit/download/)and TeraTerm Pro for Telnet/SSH (http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA002416/teraterm.html)

17. A great PHP editor for Windows :

http://www.mpsoftware.dk/phpdesigner.php

im not sure about its OS license but, it says to be free for comercial and non cmercial users, ... i think is great !!!

18. Yes , I could not agree more. There is more to open source than Linux. Apple's open source initiative comes under the banner Darvin(http://www.opendarwin.org/ or http://developer.apple.com/darwin/) .
There is no such initiative for Windows or I haven't come across one. I don't think Microsoft would follow the path Apple has taken.
What a pitty....

19. My favorite is http://www.speaktools.com/ or their development page on http://sourceforge.net/projects/speak-clipboard/. I'm using it when reading news or writing some documents. It's quite handy.

20. Heres one cool open source Java IDE called Eclipse http://www.eclipse.org . Has all features included in famous IDE's like NetBeans and Sun One Studio. Most companies are also using Eclipse for their development.