You have frozen many, many honest people for what you call "cheating" by having widely available browser ActiveX plug-ins that refresh screens automatically at preset time intervals. Refreshing a screen isn't cheating. It isn't a "program" that buys things or plays a game. How rottenrottenrotten of you. ~[removed]
Wow. Umm... where to begin?
First, Neopets itself is a game. It's played by visiting a series of pages in a web browser. So, technically, having someone else (whether it's an automated program or a person) refresh pages for you means that they are playing a game for you, which you agree is cheating. But let's forget that for a minute and use your other example.
What is the difference between using a program to outright buy an item, and using a program to help you click on that item and buy it before anyone else even sees it? Not much. Despite which of you actually did the final purchasing, the program is giving you an advantage no one else has, right? This is exactly what auto-refreshing programs do. If you can refresh a shop every two minutes using a program, that greatly increases your chances of getting an item. It's more precise than a human, and you can be off making Neopoints at Scarab 21 in another window while waiting for the shop to refresh. How is that fair? The same can be said about refreshing for avatars or Random Events, too. You are not doing the refreshing, so how can you say that you are the one earning the rewards?
So basically, none of those people were "honest," despite what you (or they) claim. They broke the rules and were frozen for it. Everyone should start on equal footing on Neopets, and while we have no control over connection speed, we do have control over whether or not we allow third-party programs. How well you do on the site should be determined by skill (and a bit of luck, of course) and not by how well you can download programs and install them on your computer.
By the way, a program being "widely available" does not make it okay to use. There are lots of things in the real world that are the same way.
The best thing about the whole answer, is that the majority of PPT had stated the same thing in a recent ongoing discussion about these programmes.