Sorry, i didn't see this started any topic on being productive without the Start menu. I guess there are replacement applications for the Start menu, but i was trying to think of other ways to be add productivity and ease of use. One i can think of is gestures. A company called Linpus has a free gestures application that works pretty well, Linpus Gesture2Launch. You can attach a gesture to an application or action like restarting your computer and then just write it on the screen. Works pretty well and saves a number of actions.

Would like to hear about other similar applications that focus on this: making things easier to do.