MaxMenus is an excellent application that lets you create menus at the corners of your screens via hot spots. You can customize these menus fully. Some options include adding your own applications or folders (customize further as "opened" or just "contents are a subfolder"), setting a menu to list all your control panel applets, and much more.
This is what is missing for those of us who switched from Windows-- a quick menu letting us get to all our applications.
Note: Works fine on intel mac but preference panel is not yet universal (v1.4).