Recommend some programs

I've been using the same programs for a while now, but they are starting to annoy me. Suggest some substitutes:

WinRAR. The splash advert is evil as fuck. I need something free that works on a wide variety of archive files.

Winamp. Back in the day, it was relatively lightweight. Now it takes an eternity to load on my laptop, if it doesn't crash first. Since I need something fast and lightweight for the laptop, suggest something like that.

Opera. You know, I was using Firefox for over a year. Then I tried Opera. I like it. It has a lot of stuff at once. But I'll be damned if it doesn't crash all the time. I'm thinking of going back to FireFox, but is there anything I should know about Opera crashing so I might can solve this myself.

Trillian. I like it, though it may be time for a change for me. Any other good messaging programs out there that support a wide variety of connections at once?

I'm not trying to start a flame war or anything. I just want to use the best programs.

>>21
Using Opera 9 build 8414 here, using 8.54 previously.
Hasn't crashed since forever. But then again, even when I was using 8.54, it has never crashed on me.

Switched from winamp to foobar myself because winamp didn't support unicode filenames. Haven't looked back ever since,

Miranda is ok, but getting the pluggins in order is a bitch. Go with the development builds. The stable version was very outdated last I checked.