There's an app for that?

http://www.launchy.net/ makes it quick to find programs referenced in your start bar. I also use http://www.stardock.com/products/Fences/ to group together shortcuts and related-use programs on my desktop. Bonus - it makes it trivial to hide all the icons on your desktop if you are a desktop neat-freak. On the Mac I would suggest Automator and Quicksilver for this kind of thing, so looking for Windows equivalents to those programs might help - something like http://www.automise.com/automise.aspx?

Sounds like a http://windowsdevcenter.com/pub/a/windows/2005/04/12/automate_xp.html is in your future. And man, are they cool. However, you have a toolchain that is absolutely crying out for shell scripting. I'll bet most of the video conversion task GUIs you are using are just doing that on the back end anyway. I use a shell script to record, master, and publish-to-html all of my video tutorials. Works great. But that is less GUI and more "spend a long time writing and improving something, but make it do everything I want when I double-click it"

Oh and somebody should be along any minute now to recommend AutoHotKey.

http://www.autohotkey.com

When point and click manifests it frustratingly repetitive side, it's definitely time to learn how to write scripts. Many, many tools have command parameters that let you do stuff, and although the Windows NT cmd scripting language is hideous by comparison with almost any other except its DOS predecessor, it's good enough for the kind of job you're talking about. If you don't mind having to install extra stuff on every computer that will ever run one of your scripts, the http://www.autoitscript.com/autoit3/index.shtml scripting language is rather less clunky than cmd, and allows you to interact moderately safely with GUI controls that you can't get to from cmd. Windows and its apps also expose heaps of controls via COM objects, and the vbscript and jscript interpreters that come supplied with it can let you do lots of useful stuff with those. Once nice thing about scripts is that once you have one, you can clone and modify it to do something related without much extra effort. You can launch a script just by double-clicking on its icon, so it's pretty easy to make folders full of scripts that control related workflows and then just click the one you want. You can also pass filenames to a script as parameters by selecting all the files you want the script to act on, then dragging those and dropping them onto the script's launch icon.

Slickrunhttp://www.fiddler2.com/SlickRun/ From their website.... SlickRun is a free floating command line utility for Windows. SlickRun gives you almost instant access to any program or website. SlickRun allows you to create command aliases (known as MagicWords), so C:\Program Files\Outlook Express\msimn.exe becomes MAIL. Enter a web URL into SlickRun and it will launch your browser and navigate to the specified address. Run multiple programs in a few keystrokes, jot a note, look up a definition... SlickRun is the most natural way to interact with your computer. Please note, SlickRun is not a "hotkey" program. If you want a program that lets you press some wacky keyboard shortcut (say, Shift + Win + 1) to run to something, you'll want to find a different utility. SlickRun is designed to be far more intuitive than "hotkey" programs-- You shouldn't have to keep an awkward mental list of hotkeys for launching your favorite programs. Instead, just type whatever's most natural for you to remember; with auto-completion, you'll rarely type more than 2 or 3 characters anyway. Studies have shown that user-defined imperative words are much easier to recall than arbitrary characters like keystrokes.

http://www.fiddler2.com/SlickRun/ Sorry forgot to link.

Couldn't you just put shortcuts for each of these programs on your desktop, maybe creating a folder for each activity containing the shortcuts used ?

Same deal with archiving media files: I use one program to rip the files, another to transcode the media, another to input extended metadata, etc. Problem is, I have multiple programs that might work better for transcoding one file type over another. And I must have a few dozen programs that perform a single specialized video conversion task. It's difficult to track when and why I would need to use one program over another. If you're ripping and encoding DVDs using your typical Avisynth-based workflow, you can use BatchEnc as a front-end to most components of it. You do end up getting into some weird uses of CLI manipulation of text files and IsCombed() when you aren't certain whether a DVD is telecined or not, but for most cases it suffices to wrap DVD Decrypter, DGIndex, and XviD/x264/NeroAACEnc/LAME/MKVMerge/etc. Batchenc saves you meddling with the batch files by hand and instead lets you re-use the same commands for a variety of sources with two clicks and a drag.