On my list of 'things to be installed on the new box before I can use it productively' are:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• Vim
• Open Office
• Perl (or ActiveState Perl on a Windows box)
• PuTTY (on a Windows box)

I try to get the same toolset (FF, TB, Vim, OO, Perl) on all the machines I use so I don't have to remember different command sets when I switch from the Windows laptop to the Linux desktop to the FreeBSD Servers and back in the course of twenty minutes.