I added buttons to link to two of my favorite freeware apps out now: Firefox and Azureus.

I've been using Firefox (instead of Internet Explorer) since it was called Phoenix (v0.3, I think). It's more customizable than IE, more secure than IE, and faster than IE. A few extensions I would recommend strongly are Adblock and ieview. Adblock helps with images that you don't want to see on pages using wildcards, and ieview is necessary for viewing pages that were created solely for viewing in Internet Explorer; i.e. Windows Update.

As for Azureus, it and the official BitTorrent client, are the only BT clients worth using. It is updated fairly regularly, so you don't have to live with bugs for too long (I've yet to find any).