Additional Programs and Tools to make your life easier
Total Commander
This is a file manager similar to Windows Explorer but with nice features. It can directly unpack .rar files and pack .zip files.
I pretty much used this all my life long and it's good.
...is a nice image viewer. It comes with a thumbnail program that lets you load thumbs from subfolders too, sort them by a number of variables and search through them easier. Make sure you download and install the additional plugins for it too so it can show .dds and other filetypes properly.
It's my favorite tool to create normal maps from image textures. It unfortunately isn't free, but since it's a one time purchase it isn't that expensive either.
NVIDIA Texture Tools for Photoshop
These let you open .dds textures in Photoshop. It also includes a plugin to generate normal maps from images but i prefer CrazyBump for this.
Lazy Tools for Photoshop
This is a set of actions for Photoshop i did to automate texture editing processes. Further information of the functions is on the download page when you click the
link above.