This one's for the not-so-faint-of-heart out there. The Vista Start Menu Emulator intends to offer Windows XP users similar functionality to what is found in the Windows Vista start menu. While it appears to be making a good stab at it, unfortunately when I tested it I found it to be extremely unstable. The current version is already Release Candidate 1, implying the program has passed through the beta process and is virtually ready for general release, but my experience wasn't nearly good enough to warrant that label. In any event, your experience may differ, since I'm sure it wouldn't get to a release candidate stage without running virtually flawlessly for some people.

The idea here is to give users a single-pane start menu, rather than the expanding one we have all come to be used to since Windows 95. It also offers the search field to allow you to search your start menu programs and launch them immediately.

If launching your applications using a text search is most interesting to you, I'd currently recommend either Colibri or Launchy, both of which have been covered here before.

[Via JKOnTheRun]