Getting teams started quickly on projects

The ability to get teams started on a project is something that takes a lot of time and resources. A few ways to mitigate that and get teams to speed fast are
1) Use Buildix(http://buildix.thoughtworks.com/) for setting up the infrastructure for the project like version control, continuous integration, agile project management and wiki and bug tracker. Buildix is open sourced under the apache license and automates setting up the basic infrastructure required fro the project.
2) Use Panopticode(http://www.panopticode.org/) to setup tools for gathering code metrics. Panopticode provides customized build scripts to integrate tools like Emma, CheckStyle, JDepend,JavaNCSS, Simian etc.
3) Use a VMWare mirror image to setup a developer box so as to remove any discrepancies across developer environments.

Windows Shortcuts and useful tools for developers

Here are a list of windows shortcuts and tools which every developer should know to work effectively.

Firefox Shortcuts
CTRL + number -- can be used to navigate between tabs in firefox. For example CTRL+1 gives the first tab,CTRL+2 gives the second tab etc.
Explorer Shortcuts
Alt+D -- leads to the address bar. The address bar as auto-completion like the tab in shells.
Command Prompt
F7 key--shows the command history
F8 key can be used to navigate across the history. Type the first few characters of the command and use the F8 key for auto-completion
Use pushd and popd. When inside a directory, pushd can be used to navigate to another directory and popd can be used to get back to the other directory. These commands work like a stack(LIFO), so prefer these over the simple cd.

Tools
CLCL -- a multi-clipboard utility
Command Prompt Explorer bar -- A sticky exlplorer-command prompt utility
PowerToys
Tweak UI
TaskSwitch
Virtual Desktop Manager