This seems to be a good place to start.

Hmm. Interesting. I should look at getting one instead of relying on either the 256meg usb chip in my phone or the partition on my media player.

I use the portable version of Firefox from this site on my USB drive, and it's what I use at work. If I have to move to another edit room, as sometimes happens, I can take my browser with me.

I carry my a file manager, and EAC/LAME, and tiny ancient versions of Winamp and Irfanview.

Well, that and a bunch of work documents and pictures and mp3s and whatnot.

Where did you find a tiny version of Winamp? I've tried to install that portably and it never works.

Yeah, portableapps is a great site - I have portable Firefox, VLC player which plays loads of different formats and I've started playing around with GIMP, but it's confusing the hell out of me.

Smallware

I've been getting into carrying apps on my 1gb drive lately. Winamp 2.91, Traktor (for DJing parties from the mp3s on the thumdrive or my MP3 player, which also acts as a drive)

Mostly I use it as a portable vault for photos. Ancient 128mb CF card full? No problem, all I need is a computer with USB host support to dump everything to the thumbdrive.

I also store music on it for sharing, and free space for people to upload something as well. This "always on" sneaker-net works great ("always on" because the drive is on my keychain and always with me), and I'm starting to like it even better than P2P or torrent sites. People *choose* stuff for you and the surprise is nice and it hardly takes any time at all.

I have a version of Putty which I use for tunneling my copy of Firefox Portable and GAIM portable. I'll nth the Portableapps site, too.