you get cats with Win7 ? cool
thats got to be a selling point !
Ive got a far better idea for launching apps:-
that is to have a typical window and have sub windows in that where each window contains icons for you apps, so you could have a window of development apps, and one for music or editing etc. its just like an ordinary app so you can bring it to the foreground minimize it etc,,
it better than the desktop because the desktop is either obscured or you have to minimize or move apps to see it, or minimize all apps with the show desktop button, its far better than a menu too as you can drag and drop more easily because the menu disappears each time you do anything to it.
oh btw i already have much of the above functionality you mentioned since about winnt3.51 theres a Microsoft set of tweak tools which does pretty much all of that although i didn't quite follow exactly how it works.