I've been guilty of recycling the same passwords across multiple sites and services.  I'm not so stupid as to use my Internet banking password on other sites, but I have recycled enough passwords for it become a headache had one been leaked.

So I figured it was time to properly secure some of my more critical resources by picking unique passwords for them.  Of course, I will never remember all these passwords which is where KeePass comes in.

KeePass stores all your passwords in a secure database which is protected by one master password.  Each password is stored as a separate entry with a title, user name, password, URL and a notes field.  You can even attach a file.  Passwords can be arranged in a folder tree and each folder can have it's own icon for easy categorisation. 

Passwords are hidden from plain view at all times, unless you choose otherwise, and with the click of a button the password can be copied to the clipboard ready for pasting into a password field.  This means key stroke loggers can't capture your password and after 10 second the password is purged from the clipboard.

KeePass can generate random password of varying complexity, depending on your preferences.  Passwords are cleverly generated in a way to ensure it is truely random, by requiring the user to supply a seed either by mashing the keyboard or moving a mouse randomly over an image of black and white noise. 

On top of all this is a whole host of features to ensure your passwords cannot be captured by any malware on your PC and your database cannot be hacked.   If you forget your master password or lose the database you are very screwed indeed.

Because this is the type of system that would require frequent and immediate access to the database, it's quite convienent that KeePass is comes in a portable flavor suitable for running off a USB pen drive.  The pen drive itself can also be used as an extra measure of security by carrying a key file that's used in conjunction with your master password to secure the database (i.e. if you are missing either the master password or the key file you can't access the database).

But if all this is too manual and inconvienent, I also found an alternative system for ensuring different site have different passwords, PasswordMaker.  It works on a very simple idea of having one master password, which is combined with the URL of the website you need a password for, to produce a unique password.  Provided you can remember your master password and the URL, you can retrieve the unique password at anytime, anywhere. PasswordMaker can be installed as a plugin for Firefox or Internet Explorer or you can simply access the online version of PasswordMaker.  The online version can also be downloaded as a standalone HTML file if you don't want to submit your master password on a live website.

My only problem with PasswordMaker is that it has a variety of parameters that effect how your password is generated.  If you forget the combination of parameters you chose to generate the original password then you going to go through a lot of trial and error to generate it again.