Skip AVG. You want antivirus software that works, isn’t bloated, and isn’t slow. Personally, I go with Avira, but Avast! is also decent enough.
@LeotCol The one virus I got was with AVG loaded. It is less than 95% effective compared to my 99.4%, and AVG is 3–5 times slower than the 2nd slowest AV program I’ve seen. Maybe five years ago before it sucked…
Firefox is a no-brainer
OpenOffice is great for those who need to deal with Office stuff but don’t want to pay $$$$
Foxit Reader beats Acrobat Reader hands down
CutePDF is good for making your own PDFs from any program that supports printing.
I agree with the GIMP if you are serious about graphics, but if you just want to view pics and maybe do some resizing, cropping, and a little color adjusting then XnView is far better. A little less overkill ;)
Spybot and CCleaner are also on my list