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.

"it does this thing where the hard drive light stays lit and the computer slows down."

Sounds like paging to me, that typically indicates you don't have enough RAM to run whatever you're running at that point, too many unneeded services, programs or whatever open. My Pentium 4 1,5ghz used to love doing that while I was playing FEAR with high graphics, it had only 768mb of RAM, so I had to tolerate it (sometimes it took a good 5 minutes to get it to close FEAR after this happened and then had to start all over from my last save) or turn down the graphics, neither of which satisfied me as I was getting a good frame rate otherwise.

If it's only doing it in Opera, perhaps it can be solved by setting the memory cache under Tools > Preferences > Advanced -> History -> Memory Cache. Typically it should be on automatic, but depending on your RAM you might lower it considerably, this can make opera RAM usage a lot lower but it also lowers your performance. Don't see why firefox wouldn't cause the same effect then, firefox also uses RAM caching aswell and typically for me it takes even more RAM than Opera does.
For comparison Opera takes 59mb of 1024mb and Firefox typically takes around 80mb of 1024.. perhaps a bug in operas automatic cache handler or something

All the instant messanging programs have different problems in my eyes ,Trillian for example looked like arse and the skinning support hardly satisfied my dislike of how small it made user icons etc and it's annoying to talk to people who use trillian. It irks me for mostly trivial reasons I suppose. GAIM uses GTK toolkit, which is not by any means windows native and it does not respond as well as typical windows programs, again annoying me to some extent. Feels bloated.
Miranda has a horrible interface and it's a burden to use without making up for it using third party mods - kind of like firefox. I get annoyed by this because I do not enjoy downloading extra stuff just to make a program usable and if there is viable alternative (in my case it was GAIM for Miranda at the time) I'll go for that instead. I guess you can say I am not that much into customizing or adding to my programs until I really enjoy using them enough to warrant it.