SecureCRT is great but PuTTY works just fine. Your text editor suggestions are right on the money, hard to beat NotePad++ or Sublime, although Geany is also great. I'm surprised no one has mentioned SmartFTP yet, it's the best FTP/SFTP/FTPS/SCP client I've ever used.
SecureCRT is great too. The reason I mention KiTTY is that before 08/13, PuTTY hadn't received any more updates or features (and still has only had 1 bugfix issued since then), and KiTTY continued the development with regular bugfixes and some nice additional features (see:
http://www.9bis.net/kitty/).
If you use mRemoteNG or WinSCP (or anything else that let's you launch an SSH session to PuTTY), you can drop the KiTTY binary over the top of it - and voila, the sessions launch in KiTTY.
Personally, I like the connection management of mRemoteNG (coupled with KiTTY), and then I have integrated mRemoteNG with WinSCP so that at the click of a button, it launches an SCP connection the the current folder in mRemoteNG's KiTTY install.I just like the way you can tie these applications together.