RESOURCES - Submit links here.

Free VST/VSTi Databases

http://www.dontcrack.com/freeware/
Probably the flagship catalogue of free VST/VSTi's. Industry backed and not terribly intuitive but a massive collection of stuff there.

KVR AUDIO
KVR is a great resource for not only finding new plugins, but also seeing when major updates are released for plugins you own - well worth signing up for the newsletter. You can limit your search to freeware and run around like a kid in some kind of store

Free VSTs (Effects)

The SSL listen-mic compressor for anyone who hasn't got it already
SSL LMC-1 (Reg Required)

Audiodamage (GREAT commercial plugs at silly prices, and the 3 free ones are top-notch)
Rough Rider
Pulse Modulator
FuzzPlus 2.2

http://www.camelaudio.com/camelcrusher.php
CamelCrusher is a free 'colouring' multi-effect plugin. It offers two characteristically different distortion sounds which can be blended together to create a wide variety of tones and textures. There's also a warm, smooth analogue-style low-pass filter with buckets of resonance and a decent compressor.

http://www.kjaerhusaudio.com/classic-series.php
VERY high quality free plugs - Classic Auto-Filter,Classic Chorus, Classic Compressor, The Classic Delay, Classic EQ, Classic Flanger, The Classic Master Limiter, Classic Phaser, Classic Reverb. ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL

http://mda.smartelectronix.com/
Well regarded, and now GPL Licenced/opensource, VST and VSTi's. A whole menagerie including multi-band distortion, drum replacement, amp and speaker simulators, de-essing, degrading, delay, detune, dither, dub delay, compressor/limiter/gate, envelope following stereo imaging and simulation, a Leslie simulator, multi-band compression, an overdrive, a really insane pitch changer, a 3D panner, a sub-bass synth, a couple of vocoders with different numbers of bands, test tone creator, flanger, pitch tracker, and more.

http://www.tweakbench.com/
Filters, synchronised gates, granular pitch shifters and other oddities. Great quality and very CPU and memory light.

http://www.sknote.it/download.htm
Mirror1 VST morphing convolver, Tolcbocs VST vocoder and RealLS VST rotary speaker

Free VSTis (Instruments)

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The KVR top5 are usually good plugins to get

dBlue Glitch
"Glitch is a highly-adjustable, semi-automated, real-time audio manipulation system which allows you to alter your music in a variety of different ways ranging from quite subtle to extremely bizarre. At its heart is a sequencer which synchronizes to the host tempo and slices the incoming audio into user-defined patterns, applying a random selection of DSP effects to each slice."

Green Oak Crystal
"Crystal is a semi-modular software synthesizer featuring both subtractive synthesis and frequency modulation (FM) synthesis. It offers abundant modulation control with over 90 parameters which may be modulated, multi-stage envelopes with graphical editors, extensive tempo sync of envelopes/lforates/delay times, built-in effects for chorus/flanging/comb filtering/echoes, and a band splitter for effects processing by frequency band. Not only that, Crystal has wave sequencing, granular synthesis, program morphing, MIDI learn, and imports soundfonts."

Synth1
16 Voice Polyphonic 2-Osc VA with Fm, Ring Modulation and Sync. 4 Filters, 2 LFO's and Arpeggiator. Cult Following

Superwave P8
Analog Subtractive Synth in the JP-8000 vein. Made in Synthedit

Rez
"Rez is a virtual analog monosynth, with a highly resonant low pass filter, that is capable of a wide range of sounds, from funky squishes, beastly basses and screaming leads, to tight arpeggiations, atmospheres, bells, and interesting effects."
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Freebies of Established Companies

http://www.emu.com/promo/proteusvx/welcome.asp
Proteus VX - Free sample player from Emu including the Composer X bank containing 1000 sample presets. Based on and will load the EmulatorX / Proteus sound banks. REQUIRES EMAIL REGISTRATION

http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?koreplayer
"KORE PLAYER is a free software instrument with a production-ready 300 MB sound library. Built on the same principles as KORE 2, the Next-Generation Workstation, KORE PLAYER includes six Native Instruments sound engines under the hood and provides ready-to-play sounds that can be browsed and tweaked via the KORE interface"

http://www.sknote.it/download.htm
Grainz VSTi granular synthesizer, Voices VSTi formant synthesizer, Traks time-stretching VSTi, Solo VSTi synthesizer

http://krakli.com/krakli-cygnus/
Cygnus VSTi - Evolving pads and soundscapes, concieved by Tim Conrady (with the soundfont version skin by Odo)

http://www.hgfortune-vsti.web44.net/se/STS/STS.html
H.G. Fortunes STS-33 - Ambient atmosphere, pad synth with a really good randomizer

http://bicycle-for-slugs.org/
Oatmeal is a two oscillator polyphonic subtractive synth with great sound capabilities and a cult following (presets and skins)

http://www.kvraudio.com/get/305.html
ReFx Claw - Absolutely ripping bass and lead synth.

http://www.lidsquid.de/grapheed/down.html
Grapheed's unique 'granular delay' concept gives instant access to a drawable 32 step delayline that controls the playback flow of audio grains originating from WAV or AIFF files. Individual grains can be triggered by MIDI events or by mouse,
with results ranging from minimal-style sounds to organic textures to cascaded bricks of audio slices.

http://antti.smartelectronix.com/
Taurus and Asynth - Two of the best analog emulations going

http://www.oxesoft.com/
THE best freeware FM synth

http://switch.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/zynaddsubfx/ZynAddSubFX-2.2.1.tar.bz2
ZynAddSubFx - Realtime, Polyphonic, Multi-timbral synthesizer with microtonal capabilities. Quite possibly the best free VSTi on the web.