I'm trying to find something free and effective that does flowcharts to a similar standard that visio does, I need to do some flowchartage, the visio trial has expired & I'm way too poor to buy it. I'd sooner find a permanent freeware replacement

Any thoughts?

I use Dia under Linux. I assume it is available for Windows as well:

http://live.gnome.org/Dia/Download
http://dia-installer.de/

Depending on your needs, you can probably also try Draw in OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice.

http://www.openoffice.org/
http://www.libreoffice.org/

Another vote for Dia. It is very effective for this purpose.

I haven't touched this sort of software in years so I don't know much about the state of the current incarnations, but Dia, Umbrello and Kivio were pretty decent last time I looked.

I've used the LibreOffice one, it's pretty good for basic flow-charts and seems to have all the right options but I haven't used visio to compare it to (a quick look at the visio site suggests LibreOffice Draw would be suitable).
For more choices try:
http://alternativeto.net/software/microsoft-visio/?license=free
to see a few free alternatives (can filter results by pay-for or free or open-source)

Depending on how urgently you need it I'd download Draw and Dia and give both a whirl.

Well yEd looks like it'd do exactly what I need so I think that one is my solution, thanks for the suggestions

I see you got an answer but I also like http://www.gliffy.com/ . It's limited to five free sheets but that's fine, I don't need to save more than that at a time, and if I did I can print it out/download a PDF. Anyway, worth trying.

This looks wonderful, at least judging from the video.