Here's a couple of programs that I've found to solve problems at work:

Some of the bank officers were getting tons of spam (about 500 a day). Of course, they use Outlook, so I went to the Microsoft site to read up on how to turn on and strengthen Outlook's spam filter. The site basically said that I need to get a 3rd party solution(!) So folks pay money for Outlook, and then MS tells them, "Good luck with the spam, I think there are some apps you can download." I didn't think our users were ready for Thunderbird, so I went looking for an Outlook plugin. SpamBayes fits the bill. It's everything a spam filter should be. It learns, makes it easy to correct false positives and false negatives, and it's free and open source. Best of all, it works great. So if you're stuck with Outlook, check it out.

Yesterday a user had some mission critical files that were stored on a floppy disk only. The floppy went bad, as they often do, and I was given the task of trying to save the files so they could be sent off later that day to meet a deadline. I tried the disk in about 5 computers, then finally found a little program called BadCopy. It scans the disk, even when Windows won't admit there's a disk in the drive. It recovered the files. They were still pretty mangled and wouldn't open in Word, but I was able to open them in Wordpad, wade through all the special characters and still salvage about half of what we needed. So, it saved a lot of typing and helped us meet the deadline. The program costs $40, but when you need it, you really need it, so that's a reasonable price. Needless to say, the user will be saving to the hard drive first from now on.