Have you tried the Open Source donationware ToDoList?

From their website:

ToDoList is a rare form of task management tool, one that allows you to repeatedly sub-divide your tasks into more manageable pieces whilst still presenting a clean and intuitive user experience.

ToDoList has been in continuous development for the last 4 years and is an ongoing project.

Your tasklists are stored in XML which provides many opportunities for advanced formatting and printing using stylesheets.

I think it fulfills several of your requirements

Paul, I don't think it lets you save the tasklist as a "session", but you can easily overcome that by first creating a "default" tasklist, and then opening it and saving it with another name to keep the "default" one unchanged and have it available later as a sort of template. You can then work with the newly saved tasklist and save its state whenever you like. The program also gives you the option (in Preferences) to keep a number of backup copies of each tasklist.

I'm saying the obvious, but here : unless you write your own application or pay someone to write it for you, it's very unlikely (still... ok... slightly possible) that you'll find exactly what you want, with all the mini details. Software and organization is a lot about compromise -- right? Compromise and choices about security, accessibility, flexibility, ease of use, portability, scalability, sexiness, price, etc. etc.

One needs to find something that's close enough and try to work with it, find ingenious solutions (use one's imagination, creativity...) to circumvent limitations. Sometimes it's a combination of different software that'll create the best solution. Sometimes one has to adapt his/her ways of doing things slightly to match the software's design, etc.

There are no perfect software. I don't have one software -- especially the ones that I intensely use everyday -- that's perfect. They're all great, but they always have a little something I wish was different. Isn't this the same with... anything else in life?

I tend to obsess too about these types of things (it's a disease) : trying to find the perfect tool for such and such, the perfect career, the perfect place to live, etc. But in the end, really, it's probably not that important -- unless, of course, one likes the fun of always looking for that "thing" that's "better" than what here and now. Nothing wrong with that, I guess... depends.

Hi, sorry I've been pre-occupied lately and haven't worked on the thread.

Two new types of software I'm looking out for:

1. Minimalistic Lightweight Tag-based Notetaker

As mentioned in this thread, Incollector isn't stable enough and Evernote is too bloated and search engine-centric to work well. Also Tobu has a flawed interface that could easily be worked on.

It would be even better if you could search/filter by tags from FARR.

2. Minimalistic Tag-based Micro-Journal software

I've tried doing this with Plurk but it's just too unstable and the search is too poor to do any decent filtering. Recently I've been doing this in Google Calendar but it isn't exactly made for re-visiting the dates of old threads. Outlook's interface is too busy and it is too heavy. Notepads are difficult to filter out and using a full fledged diary software is too distracting. Wikis can work but they aren't exactly tag-based easy to view either and again, too busy of an interface.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can suggest a better alternative.

Not to sound slow kartal but what is it?

The implementation of Franklin Covey got me interested but the screenshots look even scarier than SQLNotes and my PC doesn't have much juice to handle a slow application. (It already hanged because I have Firefox, Chrome, ThinkingRock and Compendium opened at the same time)

Thanks for the clarification. I'll have to try it out sometime. Not too high on all-in-one apps so the motivation isn't here right now.