Scott Hanselman turned me on the Launchy with his Replacing Start|Run episode of Hanselminutes (a fantastic podcast BTW). With Launchy installed you basically push a shortcut key which pops up a small text area where you start typing. Launchy will then search your startmenu for that particular piece of text on the fly and present you with a likely match. Pushing enter will then launch the program. Pretty neat.

I brought up BlogJet in a flash via Launchy by typing blog. Think of it as intellisense for your startmenu.