Like many others here, I have a base of common passwords I use. Forums have the least secure and are often the same, but they too have alpha and numeral characters. Any financial site or where I purchase from often gets a very secure unique password. And I keep track of them all in a simple text file that I encrypt with a free program,
AxCrypt. I've never really trusted programs that want to store all your passwords in their own database, I've have a few databases get corrupt for one reason or another (Sony Reader Library anyone?) and prefer my simple system.