The freewares that I use are:7-Zip BonkEnc - i use it for cd ripping and converting music filesCrap CleanerCDBurnerXPEraser - use this to securely delete ur files...Filezillafoobar2000Hamachi - use it for VLAN gamingHijackThisK Lite Codec Pack - allows me to play almost all kinds of video or audio files in Windows Media PlayerMozilla FirefoxNotepad++PDFCreator + GhostscriptWindows Live Messenger
I would prefer Kaspersky, since it is much faster than Norton and uses less resources. also, kaspersky's AV databases are frequently updated. I found Norton to be quite sluggish and uses a lot of RAM.... but i heard that the 2009 version was much better.