I've just made the leap from XP to Win 7 (64-bit) and an ancient program called Button Boogie no longer works. What it did was... allow one to control the order in which running programs were displayed on the task bar. Configure it once and your tasks would be in the same order for years. No need to start the programs in a particular order or shuffle them around; Button Boogie did that for you, automagically. A simple and brilliant feature, IMHO. Hey, imagine how much fun typing would be if Windows kept rearranging the characters on the keyboard? Anyone know of a tool or technique to accomplish the same thing in Win 7?
I don't think anything like it will be released for a while since the taskbars behaviour has changed allot. The Windows 7 approach is to pin your most used programs to the taskbar, it's not really exactly the same as you will always see the icon in the taskbar but it will always remain in the same position.
Have you tried to run it in "compatibility mode"? Right click on the .exe -> properties -> compatibilities -> tick "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" and make a choice. Who knows it might work
You can pin commonly used apps to your taskbar and set the order there... For example, I have [ Trillian | Firefox | Foobar | Photoshop | Explorer ] pinned. Any other windows, typically things I don't have open that often, get opened beyond Explorer and all my common/frequent apps stay in the same order even when closed. Switch the Keyboard layout to Dvorak... or make an AutoHotKey script to remap the keys. I'm pretty sure if you read up on AHK, you could write a small app/script to cycle through a few different key layouts so as buttons are pressed they change.