Thought that I'd compose a list of Apps that I'd recommend are installed onto a freshly installed OS (all of the one's listed below can be installed through Ninite). The HTPC that I'm working on has Win-XP MCE installed from the factory recovery media however it's intended that Win-7 failing that Win-8 are subsequently installed. I've not had any success with getting the VFD to function at all under the latter two Operating Systems however it is possible to get this to function according to what's been read on AVForums. None of the following downloads are critical one's however as a bare minimum I'd install an antivirus package and ensure that your OS has all of the most current bug-fixes and service packs installed:

1). Google Chrome - An excellent and fast web-browser (IMHO).

2). FireFox - Another excellent web-browser, not quite as fast as Chrome as far as I'm aware however in all honesty I've not been using this much since Chrome became available to download.

3). iTunes

4). VLC

5). K-Lite Codecs

6). All six of the Runtimes that are listed

7). GIMP and/or Picasa

8). Reader - Adobe PDF Reader

9). LibreOffice - An OpenOffice equivalent

10). AVG - Antivirus - Spybot and Malware Bytes can also be downloaded however I'm not convinced they're absolutely essential.

11). Online storage - As required (Dropbox in particular)

12). Image Burn, Tera Copy and Infra-Recorder

13). Compression - As required (Personally like using PeaZip however WinRAR is a popular download as well)

14). Developer Tools - As required.

Be sure to remove any bloatware / crapware from a factory image as well.