JDownloader

You know how those pesky filehosters like RapidShare always make you wait a minute or so before you can download a file, make you fill out tedious captchas (quite irritating for a 35-part file!), enforce quotas by IP, and overall act like irritating jerks? JDownloader fixes that problem, by serving as an interface between you and the hoster: You give it a bunch of links, it resolves them, checks if they are online, solves the captchas (yeah, the ones that are supposed to keep out automated programs =D), downloads with pause/resume support, packages everything in a nice folder, automatically extracts multi-part archives and so on. You can even give it a password if the archive will be passworded.

Another nifty feature is, if your ISP gives you a dynamic IP address (so that you can change it by power-cycling the modem) then JDownloader can do THAT for you as well, automatically, whenever it detects that your IP's quota is up!

Lastly, if you have premium accounts for some sites, you can give the login info to JDownloader and it will automatically use them as needed. In all, this program is an enormous improvement over just clicking the links and downloading things yourself. However...

• It's in Java. Now normally, Java isn't necessarily slow. But for whatever reason, JDownloader tends to take ages to start.

• Gets easily confused by HTTP (non-filehoster) downloads, especially if there is some php/redirection business going on. You'll need a separate download manager for that.

• The captcha recognition doesn't really do much good, as everyone is switching to reCAPTCHA. The JDownloader devs refuse to even consider adding reCAPTCHA solvers (understandable as they think it will undermine spam protection and so on, but rather hypocritical of them to make an exception for reCAPTCHA), so most of the time you have to enter captchas yourself anyway. Unfortunately there's no way to just fill in captchas in advance either, so you get popups whenever a download is about to start, which can be annoying when it happens while you are playing a full-screen game.

• The extraction plugin is not throttled and is very greedy about resources, you will get a mysterious, minutes-long (depending on archive size) slow down whenever JDownloader finishes a set and begins extracting. Very annoying when it messes up a movie you are watching by causing stuttering.

JDownloader is probably one of your best options if you need to download from file hosters despite the above. I recommend checking out Mipony, though: It is pretty much the same thing, except slightly uglier (not that JDownloader's Java UI is beautiful) and much faster (I believe it is in C++, and it shows).

No longer viable and far less safe than previous editions. Switched to web interface and or browser plugins requiring for direct tracking of online activity... first, second and or third party. Ditch this and try something else that's safer.