Here's something I wanted to do for awhile but hadn't taken the time to figure out how till now.

Power users nearly always use the Quick Launch toolbar to have one-click access to their most frequently used apps. That's great, but I use so many, my Quick Launch bar started getting huge. But if I keep it small, then for other programs I have to go through Start > All Programs > SomeFolder > Subfolder > Program. Yuck. So here's a method that worked for me, since I don't use IE as my primary browser.

1. In IE, go to the Favorites menu, then right-click Links and select Open.
2. Create folders here for your application groups. Copy and paste shortcuts here from the Start menu.
3. On the taskbar, right-click, point to Toolbars and select Links. (You may want to unlock the taskbar to position this toolbar where you want it, as well as right-click Links and ensure Show Text is selected and Show Title is not.)
4. Then in essence, you have mini Start menus for your application groups.

So I keep a handful of "constant use" items on my Quick Launch bar, and group the "frequent use" into folders here, and go through the Start menu for the infrequent others.

Nice tip, but a lttle to messy for my liking. My desktop has to be pristine clean.

yeah i gotta keep it clean too

You should try RocketDock, if you're trying to organize programs you use frequently. I use it and love it, and you can set it to autohide so it doesn't crowd open windows and such.Just a thought.

Neat. I'd try it but i use aston shell. I had to disable menus cause it had so many.

floating menus > MenuApp



click to enlarge

W2K w\ Samurize (bar chart left edge) WMC K-Lite Mega (Stargate) QCD (Black Bannana Skin) & Deskcolor

menuapp is a shortcut trick
you drop a copy of menuapp in a directory youd like a popup menu of it will display any shortcuts, files or subdirectories. Then in the case above I created shortcuts, pointing to menuapp and set the start in value to the directory I wanted, and assigned a custom icon (white marks) for the shortcut and made the text invisible

know it works with W2K \ XP not sure about Vista, based on the integral OS shortcut handling. no registry entries, easy "refresh" shortcut if your moving stuff around
can deal with special folders as well
more

one of the nice things it can do is follow your mouse, click an icon move the mouse to where you want the popup to appear any expanding submenus are handled in the normal way

also if you look at the very first entry in the menu called 0pen (thats a zero not an O to keep it at the top) its a shortcut with a custom icon to the parent directory, so you can open it in Window Explorer

if you really want clean you can make invisible icons, click on a part of your wallpaper where youve hidden it and get a popup