The safe mode sometimes is not safe enough when trying to eliminate viruses, recovering files, delete system components, and a lot more.
Microsoft created a PE (Preinstalled Environment) for this special situations. It’s basically a minimal win32 with a few services which is burned in a bootable CD or DVD.
But there’s some limitations in this Windows [...]

Format Factory is an excellent application wich lets you convert media files from almost any format to another.
For example: If you need to convert a video file to view it in iPod or Zune, or if you downloaded a video from youtube (flv) and want it in mpg, or if you recorded a sound in wav format [...]

This is one of my all time favorite bands. They are releasing their new CD on March 19th 2008, but you can download the entire album absolutely free from xfm.co.uk starting Monday 03-03-08.
Enjoy it!

Kantaris is an open-source alternative to Windows Media Player with similar GUI and features. Video playback is based upon Videolan Client (VLC) which enables Kantaris to play almost anything you throw at it without the need of installing any codecs.
Unlike VLC, Kantaris also has extensive support for music and other audio formats, these include MP3, [...]

This program allows you to copy files from disks with problems such as bad sectors, scratches or those that just give errors when reading data. The program will attempt to recover every readable piece of a file and put the pieces together. Using this method most types of files can be made useable even if [...]