If you are not a fan of Sysinternals tools then you clearly do not have your geek merit badge. While I have always kept a local copy in the past, there is now a cool and easy way to get to Sysinternals and it is via
Start + run + \\live.sysinternals.com\tools

If you are already a gigantic nerd like me and have various login scripts that run, it is way easy to simply map that share by throwing the following into your login scripts:

net use s: \\live.sysinternals.com\tools

This post will basically be a collection of some of the crap I use while working on Windows Server 2008 R2 Core edition.

Quick tool to handle basic configurations like computer name/updates/time:
sconfig.cmd tool

This is a living document of Applications you will find on my Windows OS:

FileZilla - great FTP client and server
Firefox

Adblock plus

colorzilla

firebug

Dropbox - File syncs and backups
Launchy - application launcher
LightScreen - replacement for snip it
Foobar 2000 - music player replacement
Paint.net open source image editor
VLC - Media player
SumatraPDF - lightweight pdf viewer
Ninite - mass installer of basic apps
pidgin - chat client
utorrent - torrent tool
steam - game platform
putty -
winSCP -
imgBurn - burns my iso files
7zip - compression tool
OpenOffice - haven't found anything I use in MS office that this can't replace.
Cdex - program to help with personal backups of CD's
DVDShrink -program to help with personal backups of DVD's