An Englishman's Castle

Open office for word processing etc, Avast (http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html) for antivirus and Comodo (http://www.personalfirewall.comodo.com/) for a firewall, all are free for home use.

Hope the kids appreciate your beneficence ;-)

Try something like softwarefor.org which has a whole bundle as a free torrent, open office, sound, imaging, basically everything you need. There are several organisations doing this sort of thing.
You could use the Google pack, but thats got Norton which is shite, Use AVG personal/free instead. Not as good an option but easier.
Add Picasa to any bundle.

If I were you I'd purge Windows and install something like this or this>

I can recommend both AVG as a free anti-virus program and Zonealarm as a free firewall (wwww.zonelabs.com). Both are excellent.

I used to have a man to do all this for me....

I'm not psychic...

Adding my vote for Zonealarm and Open Office but try Avast for anti virus

Also Ad-Aware for removing spyware

What Pete said, plus don't forget Adaware and Spybot (yes, you need both).

OpenOffice is good enough, and can read Microsoft Docs.

And turn on automatic patching.

Oh, and make Firefox the default browser.

Load it up with Micro$oft... if that doesn't get them out in the fresh air, nothing will. Failing that, don't be an old skinflint... buy them a Mac!

Amateurs. Get yerself over to sourceforge.net, bin that Vista malware/hardwarehog and install Freedos, load up a nice Spectrum emulator and immerse the chilblains in a true 1980's retro game-fest. Make the kids write their own office mediaplayer and climate model using Freebasic. Dress the scene with a few scattered floppy disks, remember those? and a bottle of Lambrini.

Make the system dual-boot into an excellent Linux like Centos or Fedora Core 2. You can then run Vista as a virtual machine in its own little lonely window.