Two useful free progam launchers that I have running in the background are:

• Launchy and
• SlickRun

Launchy is activated by pressing Alt+Space and has a pretty simple GUI, you type in the first few letters of the app you want to run and Launchy builds a list of appnames to choose from.

SlickRun is a simpler GUI, but has more configuration options. A command line pops up when you press the configurable hot key (mine is set to Windows+Q). The commands that you setup are called magic words and you can download collections of predefined magic words from the SlickRun website.

A more fully featured tool would be the commercial ActiveWords.