From author's site:

Open all kinds of archives. Allows you to work with 22 encode and encryption formats and 44 archive extensions. Including the popular 7z format.

Run automated backups and other operations using the powerful aks and akp scripts. Advanced file list support, including the highlighting of files that match the user defined filter. Thumbnail support to display all pictures in the archive.

Drag and drop files and directories from file list to explorer to extract or add. Context menu support to provide operations directly from the menu, without having to start the main program.

Allows you to add archive bookmarks which perform like your browser bookmarks. You can organize your bookmarks into folders. Many other tools!

From author's site:

ZipGenius is the absolutely free software for Windows® that lets you compress files to almost any kind of archive. ZipGenius supports more than 20 compressed archive formats, including CD/DVD-ROM image files in ISO9660 standard.

This is the file compression suite you were searching for: it is free and easy to use, plus it supports more than 20 formats of compressed archives, including RAR, ARJ, ACE, CAB, SQX, OpenOffice.org documents and the excellent 7-zip.

ZipGenius now can precompress executable files going to be added to a ZIP archive through the UPX compressor.

IZArc is the most complete archive utility available today. IZArc provides support for most compressed and encoded files, as well as access to many powerful features and tools like drag and drop files from and to Windows Explorer, create and extract archives directly in Windows Explorer, create multiple archives spanning disks, creating self-extracting archives, repair damaged zip archives, converting from one archive type to another, view and write comments and many more.