i was wondering what software everybody uses for every day things on their computers, like downloading/listening to music and browsing the internet, cleaning registry/internet history, video players etc

i am looking for reccomendations because i am looking for something fresh and new

 i use:

CCleaner/Cleanup!
Mozilla firefox
itunes/Ares
AIM/Windows Messenger
Media player classic/windows media player/vlc player
Alcohol 120%/Daemon tools
Bitspirit/utorrent
Spybot search and destroy
Microsoft office 2007
k-lite codec pack

FF for internet and iTunes for music/videos.

FF for internet, itunes for music and videos (although I play it all through my iPod), Office 07 for work, utorret for downloads, DVD shrink and handbrake to convert videos from DVDs, and that's about all I need to use my computer for (games as well, but they aren't relevant)

are dvdshrink or handbrake any good?

*No regsitry cleaner needed, but I guess portage does a really good job of managing my programs
Browser - Mozilla firefox
Music - I don't listen to music much on my PC's, but if I did I'd use Audacious or Amarok.
IM program - Pidgin - supports all IM protocols (or Kopete if I'm using KDE)
Media Player - Mplayer
CD/DVD burning - k3b
torrents - Ktorrent (utorrent clone for linux)
anti-virus - clamav (hardly ever use it though)
Office - Openoffice.org
codecs? - I always make sure codec support is compiled in when I compile mplayer, and the necessary codec libraries are always compiled by portage as a prerequisite.

DVD ripping - If I ever needed to I'd probably use something like acidrip.

There are windows binaries available of Pidgin and Openoffice.org if anyone is looking for those types of programs.  They do their job really well, and best of all they are free! 

 They do the job, I get decent quality for my iPod, but I'm sure you could encode them in a better resolution, handbrake gives you plenty of options on what format to put it in. What matters to me is that a 20mins TV show takes 150mb and looks decent on my iPod touch. I can do 6 episodes 20 mins each in 3 hours, but not much of that is actually doing stuff, you can set handbreake up to do all 6 episodes and then leave it for 2.5 hours, however, my computer is slow, so you could probably do it quicker.

However, they are easy to use, and do a decent job for me, but I would prefer a one stage process rather than using DVD shrink to get the VOB, before converting again

cool, i'm gonna dl and try some of these, thanks

pidgin looks cool

 ok good, thanks for the info


on a side note, does anyone have any obscure firefox addons or plugins that are download worthy? i have the popular ones, but i'm looking for more

^If by popular ones you mean greasemonkey and adblock plus, that's all I have (and that's all I need, they are awesome extensions )