Office Software

• OpenOffice a free text, spreadsheet and presentation application.
• go-oo a extended/modified version of openoffice. (never tried that one myself)

Visual design

• A free vector image editor Inkscape
• Scribus a free software to create booklets and posters.

Some other tools

• A free version of the xchat irc client http://www.silverex.org/features/

Some note's about software:

MacBook Pro

apparently apple implemented emulation for the macbook pro's disk access which makes windows xp _very_ slow reading/writing the disk. to fix this you have to reinstall...

this thread discusses the method:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=617832&start=0&tstart=0

KMail

http://forum.kde.org/kmail-on-two-linuxes-using-one-mail-folder-on-separate-partition-t-34007.html#pid51444