Ooh, great list!  Let me list mine, maybe I'll learn of some related/better tools. (I'm a tool junkie).

ESSENTIAL
- FARR, obviously
- Directory Opus - Explorer replacement, file management
- Notemap2 or Brainstorm - outliners
- PowerPro - swiss army knife, sort of
- Vim and/or Emacs - programmer's editors
- Zoom player - video player
- Faststone Image Viewer - image viewer
- safarp - uninstaller for Windows

IMPORTANT
- Super Flexible File Synchronizer - file synch
- Picasa2 - photo org
- ExamDiff - file comparison, esp text
- NOD32 AV - anti-virus
- Comodo Personal Firewall - firewall
- Opera - browser
- AutoHotKey - global key binder/scripter
- Console2 - dosbox/cmd replacement

This would be really cool, would help with tweaking the heuristics.  Is there such a function?  If not, then pretty please please please!  :D  Occasionally I don't like the sorting that comes out and I'd love to know why it came out the way it did...  Seems technically simple, and could be simply a new option in the context menu that you get when you right click on a result item.

I'm using latest beta.  I notice that there are some duplications/conflicts in alias keywords on my system.  It is possible that this is due to left-over configuration from FARR 1.x.  In either case, I'll compile a list of what duplicates I've found here in case the FARR 2.0 code ever decides to cleanup such old configurations upon upgrade to 2.0 (or especially if this is just redundancy in 2.0 code)

• "dc":  present in Core_Aliases/Websites and myaliases.alias
• "cmd": present in nircmd plugin and myaliases.alias

It goes without saying that none of these were entered by me, but merely auto-generated by FARR at some point.  I'm sure I've seen more, will keep my eyes peeled.