"Stand aside," I shouted as I dashed into the room, armed with my icon wrench and shortcut remover. I was on a mission of mercy: My neighbor Al's PC--barely six months old--had a zillion icons and shortcuts littering its Start menu, desktop, and Quick Launch toolbar. After I made a few simple fixes, the bloat was gone. If your PC is as messy as Al's was, you need my handy-dandy, quick course to a superorganized shortcut system.

Rest assured, no actual applications are harmed in the deletion, addition, or reorganization of your shortcuts. If you don't like a change, you can undo it by pressing Ctrl-Z. Although these tips work in XP, they're hit-or-miss in other Windows versions; your mileage may vary.

Start at the Start

Straighten up your Start menu first. I transformed the Programs/All Programs area of my menu by separating it into folders for various categories: Work Apps (programs I use frequently), Admin (Windows system tools), Utilities (tools I need occasionally), Internet, Video & CD, Music, Photos, and a few others, including Experiment, where I put everything I'm not sure I'll keep. I make my XP folders easier to identify by changing their icons: Right-click the folder, choose Properties, Customize, Change Icon, and select a substitute image that has a little color.

Customize your Start menu by dragging, dropping, renaming, and deleting items, or try this power user's secret: Right-click the Start button and choose Open. Windows Explorer appears, and voilà! You have a much easier way to change your Start menu. (To make the same changes for all users on the PC, choose Open All Users.) When you uninstall a program, its folder and icon shortcuts may not be removed automatically, but that's no biggie--just manually delete them.

Now get rid of all the junk from the Start menu's program folders, such as icons for help files, readme.txt files, and links to Web sites. Take another minute to zap the ubiquitous AOL, RealOne, and other useless advertising icons. In XP, drag and drop often-used applications to the list of "pinned" items in the top left of the Start menu. (They're "pinned" because the items in the list don't change the way shortcuts on the bottom left of the menu do as you use various programs.)

The next stop is the Quick Launch toolbar, the area directly to the right of the Start menu. (If yours isn't showing, right-click the taskbar and select Toolbars, Quick Launch.) Mine's tight: It has just the shortcuts I use every day--Word, Eudora, Explorer Plus, Outlook, IE, the music player Tray Play, and the desktop icon. I also moved the icon for Word's handy Open Office Doc from the Start menu to my Quick Launch toolbar. Drag seldom-used Quick Launch icons to your desktop, and decide later whether to move them to the Start menu or, if they're duplicated elsewhere, to delete them. Once you have just the Quick Launch shortcuts you need, right-click an empty spot on the taskbar, and if necessary uncheck Lock the Taskbar. Grab the vertical divider and slide it to the left to regain taskbar space. In XP, you can also right-click each icon, select Properties, and delete the useless, toolbar-obliterating junk in Comments.

A Très Cool System Tray

Now to refurbish the system tray, which is alongside the clock. Many of the icons here--such as those for AOL and RealOne--are on the Start menu and the Quick Launch toolbar, too. To remove one from the system tray, right-click the icon and look in its preferences or settings for something like "don't load on start-up." Or clean the corner the easy way with WinPatrol, a free utility that lets you safely disable or remove these icons (ironically, the program resides in the system tray). And a note to all you people using Windows 98: You don't have XP's 'Hide When Inactive' system tray feature, so try out Tray Pilot, a freebie that hides the tray to give your taskbar more room for your open-app links. You can easily download both. For more on scrubbing the area, read my in-depth tips for removing icons from your system tray.

Excuse me, I've got to pack up my tools and go. The mail carrier just asked me to work on his PC's desktop.

Contributing Editor Steve Bass is the author of PC Annoyances, published by O'Reilly. Contact him at homeoffice@pcworld.com.