<p>I have set of names and addresses that have been entered into and excel spreadsheet, but the problem is that the many people that entered the addresses entered them in many different non-standard formats.  I want to scrub the addresses before transferring all of of them to my database.  Looking around, all I really found in the way of address scrubbers(parsers or formatters) is the one that is put out by <a href="http://www.semaphorecorp.com/" rel="noreferrer">Semaphore</a>.  For my purposes, I don't really need all of that and I don't want to pay for the licensing fees for the software.  Is there anything out there that is Free and/or Open Source that will do the scrubbing for me? </p>

Most of the software that I've worked with to do this is very expensive (or to put it another way, marketing departments are naive and have huge budgets).
This sort of work is a precursor to Geo-coding.  This
linked Wiki article
includes a list of Geocoding software, some of which is free.  If you're lucky, some of the free ones may include address standardizing routines.
If you find a good one, let me know.