Nothing like starting a fresh install and having to claw around for the latest and greatest for each of the integral 3rd party modules.

Here are a few starters & their CVS checkout linkages. You should execute these from within the _sites/all/modules_ directory in your Drupal 6 install. You should create this directory if it doesn't exist already.

If you're interested in reading more about CVS and Drupal, check out my pal Nick's post, titled Painless Revision Control with CVS and SubVersion

Update!: If you'd like to store these CVS commands, there's a new app out there called Snipt that's for developers to keep track of obscure code like this.

These are the latest branches as of August 7, 2008

Devel

A suite of modules containing fun for both module and theme developers

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -d devel -r DRUPAL-6--1-10 contributions/modules/devel

Content Construction Kit (CCK)

The Content Construction Kit allows you to add custom fields to nodes using a web browser.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -d cck -r DRUPAL-6--2-0-RC4 contributions/modules/cck

Views

The views module provides a flexible method for Drupal site designers to control how lists of content (nodes) are presented.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -d views -r DRUPAL-6--2-0-RC1 contributions/modules/views

Image

This module allows users with proper permissions to upload images into Drupal. Thumbnails and additional sizes are created automatically.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -d image -r DRUPAL-6--1-0-alpha2 contributions/modules/image

Google Analytics

Adds the Google Analytics web statistics tracking system to your website.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -d google_analytics -r DRUPAL-6--1-2 contributions/modules/google_analytics

jQuery Update

This module facilitates an upgrade of jQuery in Drupal core and allows other contrib modules to rely on a newer jQuery version.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -d jquery_update -r DRUPAL-6--1-1 contributions/modules/jquery_update

Administrative Menu

Drupal Administration Menu provides a theme-independent administration interface (aka. "navigation", "back-end") for Drupal.

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -d admin_menu -r DRUPAL-6--1-0 contributions/modules/admin_menu

To be honest, this post is more for my own reference than anything else. I'll keep it updated as I continue developing Drupal apps :)

Old starter modules

Some modules used to be in the list above, and don't really have a place there anymore. These are those modules.

SimpleMenu

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs.drupal.org:/cvs/drupal-contrib checkout -d simplemenu -r DRUPAL-6--1 contributions/modules/simplemenu

The descriptive text below each module name was copied from the module pages at drupal.org.