I feel your pain, waiting for menus to appear is really irritating.
My quicklaunch menu contains maybe 15 entries. Still quite fast to pop up, but I nearly stopped to use them when I installed launchy.
http://launchy.net/
Launchy is a fast launcher, a bit like win+R on steroids.
It scans automatically the entries of your Start->Program menu and lets you enter as many letters needed for unique entry, then launch.
It also learns which entry you use most. Say that you have a program called notepod
and one called notepad
.
In the beginning it might pick the wrong entry until you enter the o/a. After several launches, it learns which one you're more likely to mean directly. If you use notepad
more often, it will pop it as first choice.
The only problem is that you need to know the name of the programs you use. Not really a problem, actually.
You can also customize keyboard shortcuts for opening the launchy prompt window. And you do not need to take your hands from the keyboard to reach your mouse.
I currently launch emacs like this: alt+home, e, enter
.
Notepad? alt+home, n, enter
.