Well you kow I am not really so amused by your interpretation of the problem as much as it is a reminder to my own problems in the past when I first purchase my first Mac.
Never owning my own personal computer before I was a little naive and kind of thought everything was going to be perfect and work smoothly. And everything did especially when I loaded Illustrator 8
disabled the Apple software. And then i found these great utilitities that really help me a lot including applications like launchbar.
But everytime they fixed a problem they create three others and i started to turn things on and off at Adobe's suggestion and found I could locate the issues. But then I found though most of the developers where really gald to have the issues pointed out to them, some would deny the obvious truth and I had to send my concerns to them thre e or four times before i would get the e-mail back stating, oh yes thsank you we were able to reproduce the problem. We will have fix shortly and most times they would fix the problem. But some of these developers are really not concerned about the fact that tthey are hindering their customers workflow and would not really bother to fix the issue. Their only concern was the money they could get and the cost to them to fix the issue. And so they are out of business and someone more resonsive has com along.
Having said that I have a utility that i use and can recommend that might be helpful.
It is aclled DragThing
You can use it as a launcher from the desktop, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to launch applications and scripts. you can copy text to the the drawers as well as art and then paste it at a later date even after you restart your computer it is not copied to the clipboard.
You can save urls links folders and it is a very cool utility I have never encountered a conflict with using it for over a decade.
You can arrange drawers for applicatioins and for folder and art and for text you can make sets of draws.
it folds int ot he side of the screen out of sight until you need it. But I like that fact that I can launch any application with a keyboard shortcut the most.
It is an old time favorite, they claim over the yr=ears that there have been a few conflicts about four I think in all the time I have been using it but it never effected my work. maybe they did, it seems to only work on a Mac.
They have never asked me for an update fee.
Perhaps it is time to look for something similar for Windows or ask them to develope it for Windows and offer to test it for them.
