This thread is great! Not sure if this has been posted before but here's a Photoshop CS6 (and cs5) extension that extends the functionality of the colour picker. You can combine two colours and generate a range from those two. PaintersWheel CS6 - Free!
CrazyBump LINK Space age normal maps from the future. $100 for personal licenses. FileBox Extender LINK Nice little app to tweak a few basic windows ui things, very usefull. Xnormal LINK Xnormal, bitches. Use it, its fucking free and awesome.
Snowfly: mibbit.com will sort you out as far as irc is concerned. Very complete and fast for what it is. I can only second things that are already in this thread, sadly. Filebox extender, irfanview/xnview, pidgin, err... I'm forgetting so many things. Cgtextures and imageafter.... Xnormal, ofcourse! Launchy, too.
IrfanView: www.irfanview.com A free image viewer program. Cycle through directories of images with spacebar/backspace. Opens nearly anything and it's nicely lightweight. I use it all the time to crop bits of screengrabs to save out. Image browser and batch converter are useful, too. UltraMon: www.ultramon.com $40. Extends…