Firewalls
Comodo firewall is something I've used for years because I loved the ability to monitor and block programs that want to connect to the internet. But lately I've been looking for an alternative because Comodo mines data, and Windows firewall is not great.
simplewall seems pretty great. It's completely free, open source, very lightweight (less than 1MB!) and allows you to block many Windows services including Windows update. I'm currently testing it out.
Office
OpenOffice is a program I've also used for many years but recently I discovered LibreOffice. It's actually a fork of the original OpenOffice.org but is more actively maintained than Apache OpenOffice fork and not owned by any large corporation. Now it does have a modern flat theme, which Ross will probably hate, but it also supports custom themes. So you can make it look however you like.