End Start Menu Program Insanity! (a solution for too many programs on your start menu)

If you're like me - you do a lot of stuff with your computer:

All off this requires a lot of software. Most of it I rarely use - but by default it all sits in a fairly flat structure under "Programs" on the start menu. This results in something looking like the following:

Obviously this is near worthless if I'm trying find an application I don't use regularly enough to create some kind of alternate shortcut to.

Windows Vista has a much better "search based" model for locating programs. Unfortunately, I'm not planning on making the jump to Vista anytime soon.

There's a work-around though - you can re-sort programs into a hierarchical structure based on what they do:

After organizing things like this - I've found my start menu comes up much, much quicker. The performance improvement is really quite impressive.

Annoyingly - there are two separate two sets of program groups, so you'll need to do this twice.

The program groups can then be managed just like any other folders.

I chose to start all my custom folders with "_" - that way you can sort them so they appear on top of any programs you haven't categorized yet.

With the "classic" start menu, you can do a sort on your start menu by right clicking the start menu, choosing "properties" and then "customize." Unfortunately, I haven't been able to locate the same feature for the "XP Style" start menu.

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