Debuggers

[synkro]

Me, I prefer Ollydbg, cause it has become quite popular, even replacing softice. It's free and has trumendous support especially for scripting; you can find a lot of ollyscripts for unpacking protections for example.
IDA on the other hand is quite powerful for disassembling (windows/non-windows binaries) and can do a fair job for debugging. I use it for remotely debugging linux apps too.

Note for SquareD: graphs in IDA are annoying indeed, but you can disable them. Right-click in the IDA-View window, and select Text View.