I have now tried Progress Bars of Life, and surprisingly, it has a different purpose than Barbecue -- not suited to my need.

PBoL is focused on tracking time progress: set the time or date target, and it counts down for you. But it is cumbersome for tracking irregular progress in concrete units such as pages or chapters read (what PBoL calls "manually set range"). To add units requires 7-8 clicks:
- View
- Options
- Progress Bar Items (if not already focused)
- Name (double click)
- Current Value
- Accept
- Accept

I don't want to go through all that every time I add a unit or two of progress. Obviously PBoL is optimized for automatic time progress, not manual addition of progress.

Furthermore, the bar color -- green to yellow to orange as the time limit approaches, then red as the limit is passed -- is more suited to a time countdown than, say, tracking the number of games played.

Barbecue is focused on tracking non-chronological units rather than time. For this it is slightly easier than PBoL because only 5-6 clicks are required:
- Tray icon (two clicks, depending on configuration)
- Title (if not already focused)
- Number
- Show meter bars
- Close or Escape

This could be improved, as I suggest in my comment below.

Wish: Provide an option to specify the number of decimal places reported in the % done. Currently two places are displayed, but none or at most one would be fine for me. I think fewer decimal places is simpler and easier to read. And if I'm reading a 500-page book, a few hundredths of a percent difference is not significant, so I don't need or want to see it. Thanks.

I finally noticed the pattern to this problem. Not surprisingly, it is related to User Account Control. (I am using Win 7/64, but it almost certainly applies to Vista as well. It was not a problem in Win XP.)

In every case the offending program requires approval of the UAC message "Do you want to allow the following program to make changes to this computer?" The problem disappears if UAC is turned off (set to "Never notify"), which confirms that it is associated with UAC.

Questions:
1. Can other users confirm this pattern?

2. Does anyone know how to run the offending programs without requiring this UAC approval every time? I have experienced it with CCleaner, Revo Uninstaller, and Paragon Backup & Recovery, and it is reasonable that programs of that type would require higher security permission. But I also have the problem with two text-based database programs which are no security threat at all. In any case, I would like to permanently approve these programs so they can run without specific UAC approval. (I am using an Administrator account.) Thanks.