So, recently I decided my flash drive was boring, so I decided to spice things up.
Then I decided to add some more to the mix...
And got carried away.
So, here it is: My EVIL MINION.

I started with the obvious: U3 Sandisk Cruzer Micro is such a bland name. So I renamed the drive Evil Minion, not much to it.

Then I changed the icon. Basically, you get a .ico file. Google it and you can find a few pre-made ones, but they're mostly 16x16 resolution, because they're designed for use in Firefox URL bars and tab labels, not for drive icons. So I went and found a free .ico file format plugin for Photoshop and made my own .ico file.
Drawing on the Evil Minion theme, I got a Mini Me picture, shrunk it a bit, and renamed it autorun.ico
I put the autorun.ico file in the root directory of the flash drive, then opened notepad.
I typed:
"[autorun]
icon=autorun.ico"
then saved it as autorun.inf and put that in the root of the flash drive, too. BAM! New icon.

But so far all I'd done was change the asthetics. I wanted to add some serious functionality, too. So here comes another load of fun!
I found a bunch of portable apps. There's tons floating around, and I got the following:
7-Zip (Compression tool)
Abiword (Word processor that is compatible with Microsoft Word format)
Firefox (Portable web browser, stores all my goodies like bookmarks, themes, and extensions)
TorPark (Basically another version of Firefox, but this one also automatically connects to a proxy server and encrypts information, so it's more secure and anonymous. It does some other junk, but I won't post about that here)
System Information (Automatically scans the host computer and gives me a lot of diagnostic information, along with some goodies, like MSN Messenger passwords and user names)
Audacity (music editor)
VLC Player (video player)
Sysinternals Process Explorer (Brings up lots of detailed info an all running processes)
LC ISO Creator (For ripping CDs off of my friend's computers to use on mine)
Foxit Reader (Views PDF files, but runs faster than Adobe's PDF viewer and takes much less space)
Great News (An RSS reader)
GIMP Portable (An image editor)

Here's programs that will be on there when I get around to it:
Filezilla (FTP client)
Trillian (All-in-one instant messenger)
µTorrent (Really, really tiny Bittorrent client)
ClamWin (Not sure that's the right name, but it's just an anti-virus.)
DamnSmallLinux (This is really a because I can addition. It's just a tiny version of Linux that can be booted from a flash drive, so I can carry around a separate OS with me. There's also PuppyLinux, which is more or less the same thing. Both come with a ton of applications for Linux built in, so even though they take 50 MB, which is about 10x most of the other apps, there's a lot crammed into that 50 MB. Web browser, word processors, media players, etc. are all bundled with it.)

Anyway, that's all nice and well, but it isn't very intuitive. I mean, I have to open up the USB's directory, browse through the folders, and THEN click on the program. Sure, its only fifteen extra seconds, but I might as well fix that up, too. So here's what I did: First, I downloaded another program, called PStart. Basically, it's like a start menu for my flash drive.
Then, I went and opened up Notepad again, and created a file called launch.bat. It's a simple Microsoft DOS Batch file, crude, but effective. Inside launch.bat, I typed this:
"@echo off
start PStart.exe"
and saved that into the root of the USB drive as well.
The @echo off is just to stop the DOS prompt from repeating every command it gets. Basically, it makes things look nicer, and isn't really necessary. The "start Pstart.exe" is what matters--that's what's going to start the PStart start menu quickly.
Then I went over to autorun.inf, opened it up in notepad and added an extra two lines, so it now reads:
"[autorun]
icon=autorun.ico
open=launch.bat
ACTION = Launch portable workspace"
This adds some info to Window's autorun feature so that PStart will come up immediately. On XP computers, it will pop a window that asks what you want to do, and the top option will be the "PStart" program. So just click that, then press OK. Bam! PStart's running, and from there you can access all the programs on the flash drive in a single click. It also minimizes to the taskbar, so it acts like a second start menu. On older computers, its even faster, since they skip the action select window and just start the program (though I haven't tested this, and it would probably be glitchy since not all my progams are compatible with older Windows versions).

Just as a finishing touch, I went to the properties window and changed autorun.ico, autorun.inf, launch.bat, and some of the program's files to "hidden" status, so the wouldn't appear when browsing the flash drive (unless the user selects "show hidden files" in Windows Explorer).

Anyway, the finished project is this:
When I put in the flash drive, I get PStart to open instantly:


Browsing the flash drive looks like this:


So. If any of the rest of you have super awesome flash drives, or decide to make one, post 'em here. Or ask questions on how to make one, I'm up for that, too.