What are some fast methods for navigating to frequently used folders in Windows 7?

(This is a followup question from my previous question.)

In windows XP I used to be able to quickly navigate to frequently used folders by making use of the 'Favorites' menu item and the hotkey behaviour. In certain conditions it could be set up so that getting to a particular folder was as easy as alt-a x (and without a file explorer window open it was as fast as win-e alt-a x).

I am struggling to get anywhere near this speed in Windows 7 and would like to solicit advice from others regarding fast folder navigation to see if I am missing any methods.

My current way to navigate quickly is basically

1. move hand to mouse
2. move cursor to navigation pane/pain.
3. scroll all the way to the top (because normally I the panel is focused on whatever deep directory structure I am already in).
4. sift through my 50+ favorites to get the one I want, or click a link to a folder that contains further links in some sort of 'pseudo-tree' functionality.
5. select it.

This is slower than my previous method by upwards of an order of magnitude.

There are a couple of things I've contemplated:

1. add expandable folders, not just direct links, to the favorites menu.
2. add expandable folders, not just direct links, to the start menu.
3. add links of my favorite folders to a submenu of the start menu so that they come up when I search them. They do but this still rather cumbersome
4. started using 7stacks - url here (I cannot link the url directly due to lack of reputation but http://www.alastria.com/index.php?p=software-7s). This is about the closest I've gotten to some sort of compact, customizeable, easy to access, tree based navigation structure.

How do you power users quickly navigate to your favorite folders? Are there keyboard shortcuts I am missing? Can someone recommend other apps or addon or extensions that can achieve this sort of functionality?

The Current solution (thanks to the answers below) I am going to use is a combination of Autohotkey and 7stacks - autohotkey to launch 7stacks, 7stacks with the 'menu' stack type for fast, key-enabled navigation to folders organised in a tree structure. This solves about 90% of the issue, the only issues are (note that these are really minor, I am really splitting hairs more than anything here)

1. Can't use this for existing folder navigation (ie already have a explorer window open, want to go to another directory)
2. A bit more cumbersome to add/remove entries to compared to xp favorites.
3. A little slower than xp favorites.

Whatever. I'm happy. Thanks guys.

I think the answer is a split to John T and Kelbizzle - I've elected to give the answer to John T and +1 to Kelbizzle as I had already mentioned 7stacks.

Solution 1:

I use Autohotkey for a magnitude of things, navigation to my frequently visited folders being one of them.

The language can get quite complicated, but when doing basic things like this, it's fairly straightforward on how to add new hotkeys.

Example, open your Windows directory:

^!w::Run C:\WINDOWS

this would allow me to open explorer to C:\Windows by pressing Ctrl + Alt + w. You can make a multitude of these, just make a duplicate line in your AHK script and modify the hotkey sequence and directory:

^!w::Run C:\WINDOWS
^!s::Run C:\WINDOWS\System32
^0::Run C:\

A great overview of how to make hotkeys is here in the Hotkey Documentation. Feel free to email me for any extended discussion on AHK, if you don't feel like posting a bunch of questions!

Solution 2:

I have used the Windows key + R to 'Run' the folder I want. The advantage is it is then in the history so the last folder I ran is at the top of the list of commands, and folders I ran longer ago are suggested as I begin typing the path to the folder I want. Not as complete a suggestion as John T's or Molly's, but simple and good for maybe a dozen favorite folders.