The How-To Geek has an interesting tip how to restore the Quick Launch Bar in Windows 7.  The basic idea is insert the special path %appdata%\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch as a new toolbar and then turn off the show text and show title attributes.  See his post for step-by-step instructions and pictures.

Here, we note that the method can be generalized.  Rather than use a windows-defined quick launch, we have used our own folder(s) ... yes folders, 5 of them in fact.  Here is a reduced screenshot of our toolbar

Programs we use all the time and having distinct icons are just to the right of the start button. Show text and show title is turned off and the width is set to show all 18 icons. To the right is "App", a collection of 8 lesser used applications. Title is turned on and text turned off. We have clicked on the ">>" just to the right of App to show the popup select menu.  Folders are next and because they do not have generally distinct icons, they are in a separate collection.  The programs we use for program development are in the last two sections with a popup and full set of icons, respectively.

Note that each of these 5 toolbars point to folders on the hard drive which we manage. The folders can have nested folders.  Indeed, one of the nested folders within the Fold toolbar is our entire XP desktop for reference.

We have used very short names for the toolbars: App, Fold, Dev, etc. to avoid taking up space.

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