CrestaProject

FREE Crest Posts Widget is a simple but powerful WordPress Widget which displays your posts with thumbnail and many other options like the ability to show the date, the number of comments, to change the length of the excerpt, change the size of thumbnails and much more.
Some features:
<ul>
<li>Easy to use interface</li>
<li>Change post title heading tag</li>
<li>Display the date</li>
<li>Display the comments count</li>
<li>Choose thumbnail size</li>
<li>Choose excerpt lenght</li>
<li>Order posts by date, title, comment count and random</li>
<li>Filter posts by category</li>
</ul>

Plugin Homepage 
http://crestaproject.com/downloads/cresta-post-widget/

Cresta Post Widget FREE

Widget for show all posts or filter by category. Many options available including show thumbnail, excerpt, date and comments count.

Nick Momrik

Retrieves a list of the most recent posts.
<h3>Configuration</h3>
You may pass parameters when calling the function to configure some of the options. 
Example: <code>mdv_recent_posts(10, '', ' ', true, 5, false, false)</code>
The parameters: 
$no_posts – sets the number of recent posts to display 
$before – text to be displayed before the link to the recent post 
$after – text to be displayed after the link to the recent post 
$hide_pass_post – whether or not to display password protected posts 
$skip_posts – allows skipping of a number of posts before showing the number of posts specified with the $no_posts parameter 
$show_excerpts – allows the post excerpt to be output after the post title 
$include_pages – allows recent pages to be show with recent posts
<h3>Version History</h3>
1.1.2 – Added a space before rel=”bookmark” 
1.1.3 – Fix the space for real. Props Sandro Bonazzola 
1.2 – Use the esc_* functions and cleanup coding standards

Cresta Post Widget FREE vs Recent Posts