Well, after downloading “the basics” I’ve started looking around for more open source software. Here’s some of what I’ve found, downloaded, and loved:
A plain ‘n simple RSS feed aggregator that supports both RSS and Atom formats, and works on Windows 98 and above. It’s pretty much perfect. Although it’s a bit slow (as most RSS aggregators are) it works fine.
Yet another “plain ‘n simple” program that looks nice and simple, like the older versions of windows media player but can play just about any file that there is out there, including quicktime.
I’ll update this with more later, but I got both of these from this great website for windows open source programs, which also has a macintosh counterpart.

Correction, RSS Readers are only slow on your computer.
Not true. I seem to remember clearly… you said the flock rss reader was slow….