I find myself taing screenshots often at mostly portions of the screen; whether it is to show work in progress to others or something else. For those instance, I have been using Snagit from techSmith for years. This is a relatively cheap solution for performing these tasks. I loved having the ability to add arrows to the screenshot or a shadowed border that can then be immediately copied and pasted in an email or anywhere else. However, it is $49 and releases about once every year. 

So, I stumbled upon Zscreen, an open-source screen capture program for Microsoft Windows. I find this app very powerful and has more option than I have use for. Including automatic uploading to ftp servers, emailing, naming conventions, silent operations and performing custom actions on any images captured: I am thinking this free option will be my choice for screen capture for the future.