Cool Emacs module of the day: Emacs Information Manager (mysteriously abbreviated ee).
It's a framework for dealing with tree structures, and a load of small apps pushing existing Emacs concepts into this way of looking at things.
Seems very useful for things that are inherently treeish, like directory trees, buffer list ordered by directory, imenu categories and entries, Emacs configuration and documentation, TAGS etc.
The thing I had most hope for was the dired tree, which seemed very close to what I'd like to have: a Windows Explorer type of setup with a directory tree and a file pane. Unfortunately it's not quite what I'd like, but perhaps a bit of hacking could take care of that.