Tools I Use

I have a Saleae Logic Analyzer, one of my more expensive investments. It's worth every penny.

A good Hyperterminal replacement is RealTerm.

My current AVR programmer is an USBTinyISP. It's nice and cheap, it'll do everything I need it to do. I do plan on buying an AVR Dragon soon because I need the debugging features it offers.

For AVR fuses, I always use this online fuse calculator. I have even built my own custom C# application that interfaces with that webpage and launch AVRDUDE commands for me.

For AVR UART baudrates, I find it easier to refer to this page than to look in the datasheet.

For SVN, I use TortoiseSVN with Google Code

If you need a virtual machine, go get Sun's VirtualBox.