Nice! Good idea, good implementation.

Some brainstorming:

I have for some time used a "master AHK-script" on my own computer i.e. a single large script that handles almost all hotkeys. That script either (1) contains various other small scripts as functions or (2) controls other small standalone scripts through command line parameters. (I made it since I earlier on used a program called Girder which also had centralized control over various hotkeys and then subparts related to specific tasks so I wanted something similar)

So most of the time I only have this one master AHK-script running. Most of the standalone scripts are launched when needed and then closed afterwards. That makes the tray area less cluttered with green H icons :-)

This works great but is of course not generic enough to be useful for others.

AXEM has some similarities. A big difference is that AXEM doesn't control what hotkeys the different scripts use (if any). So now let me throw out this question: would such a hotkey configuration/control feature be possible and useful to include in AXEM somehow?

davidtheo: I agree with most of the others: go with Ubuntu.

An alternative to burning and running liveCDs is to do some virtual installs using virtualbox ( http://www.virtualbox.org/ ) or some similar tool.

Also, if you already have XP/Vista on your laptop then consider doing a dual boot installation. (You can test that in virtualbox too.)

To move forward with this idea, maybe we should brainstorm concerning what features any 3rd party tool should have to help achieve what isd requests. Here are some suggestions:

(1) very small and quick to launch
(2) free
(3) supports the relevant sort of "virtual folders" or groupings
(4) can be controlled from FARR or from a FARR-plugin
(5) the groupings can be saved in some way (two versions: save a list of paths to the files OR save the exact search that was used to find them in FARR. The latter would be some sort of FARR search bookmarks.)

I'm imagining a file browser window that behaves sort of like Windows Explorer's search result window: it lists a number of files from various places on the harddisk(s) as if they were all in one folder, it allows you to operate on the files (move, copy, execute...), it allows several different views (thumbnails, as a list, detailed view...).

I can think of two types of candidates for this:
1. some standalone file manager ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_file_managers ). A problem is that most are very feature rich all purpose file managers, where we really need something as minimalistic as possible (but still with support for grouping).
2. a dedicated FARR plugin that has the sought after features. Maybe made in autohotkey or some other language. This in turn would probably depend on there already existing some modules in these languages that can be used to achieve the virtual folder/grouping feature.

This thread from 2006 discusses just this kind of thing (though not in relation to FARR): https://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=6419.0