Forget the Start button, use Launchy

Launchy is a neat little stay-resident program that lets you launch applications on your machine with a few keystrokes. Launchy indexes all the applications on your system, allowing you to open them by typing a few letters of their name. For instance, hit the Alt–Space Bar key combo to bring Launchy to the front, enter “Exc” (no quotes) and the program recommends Excel. If this is what you want, hit Enter and bingo, Excel appears. No need to go hunting through start menus or the 4 million icons on your desktop (that might just be me though.) Best of all, Launchy is free. I found this handy app on Digg.