I have 2 identical hard drives with 3 RAID-0 partitions for Program Files, Documents (encrypted) which contains music and videos in respective folders and for Gaming Program Files. Then I have a single partition for Windows (ENYO - have you found a way to put this on a RAID - 0 partition?) and another temporary partition on a ramdisk for temporary downloads and test installs. Useful to keep Windows on a separate partition for reinstallations of the OS. Windows Media player and Creative Mediasource will automatically monitor folders for changes in media. Also have separate partition for backup of all other partitions.
Ended up with so many downloads in different sub-categories that I burnt my favourites onto separate CDs and ended up creating a website with categorized links
http://decentdownloads.freeservers.com/ so that if the house got burnt down with CDs and PC, at least I know where to go to re-download!!!
My start menu is unique. It's empty!!! With all the useless links and so many program installed the start menu becomes very inconvenient. Instead, I drag the shortcut to the executable into True launchbar and delete everything else with another right click. True Launchbar is divided into useful, tidy categories corresponding to those on my website and CDs (check out screenshot).Everything is arranged in alphabetical order by a simple right click. As you can see, I only have the most often used links on Y'z dock at the top and on special keyboard buttons.
I don't find the desktop icons very useful. Therefore my desktop is clean as a whistle. What's the point of having to minimize all windows just to get to the desktop? Instead, I have large essential desktop icons on the taskbar. Extending the taskbar also allows more icons in the system tray. Also, I find the Windows Media player toolbar powertoy handy.
As for cleaning, I use Cleandisk 2001 as an all in one cleaner as well as JV16. As for finding my way around, I use bookmarks in 2xExplorer. If you want a 3D method of desktop organisation, check out 3DNA. Starter will clean up rubbish on system start up and Ad Aware/spybot will clean up ad-ware etc. All links to these programs on my website (above).
So there you have it - tonnes of programs installed yet still very much neat, tidy and user friendly.