The clue's in the title.

I'll start off by endorsing Launchy. It's a keystroke launcher for Windows, similar to Katapult and whatnot on other systems.

It's tiny and fantastic. Basically you press alt-space and a tiny window comes up. Type in a letter or two, and it guesses what you are trying to launch. It also learns from your previous choices:






(Uh... Firefox )

Anyway... it can even be used as a file navigation tool... no more My Computer, and with the proper plug-in, it even supports arithmetic, so no more calc. I haven't used the start menu in months nor have I clicked any desktop icon (nor had any icons there lol).

It's weird for half and hour. But after then, you're entirely dependent on it. I find myself pressing alt+space on other computers and being briefly perplexed.

So, yeah. Share the apps that you could not live without.