WinRAR does not have this limitation that BZIP2 does.
Because it supports (limited) recovery from media errors. If you are trying to restore compressed data from a backup tape or disk, and that data contains some errors, bzip2 may still be able to decompress those parts of the file which are undamaged.
There is also 7zip so for those that do want a free archive util there are a few out there. I just prefer RAR myself.
