I gave up on ActiveWords yesterday.  I know a lot of bright people seem to think it's great but it just doesn't work for me.  I just didn't find myself using typed shortcuts that often, I have a reasonably uncluttered machine and don't have problems launching programs thanks to truelaunchbar.  Although the idea of launching documents by name makes sense in theory, in practice it wasn't that useful.  In fact if I was going to do this I think I would put the documents in Personal Brain same thing only better metadata and all linked together.

And then there are downsides.  I found the trainer very irritating.  It weights foreground and background activations of folders and documents equally.  This meant that it was forever popping up folders and documents that Radio was scanning in the background.  The only solutions seemed to be turn up the thresholds or turn it off - both of which negate one of the more powerful aspects of the product.  If I have to manually tell AW what i'm interested in then I really would rather use Personal Brain.  Also AW really needs to give you enough context to work out which document or folder it is talking about - the name is not enough.  I believe they are working on that.

Also I found they way AW would popup while I was typing disconcerting.  Most of the time I'd rather spell check at the end of a period of writing than "as I go" (maybe I make more spelling errors than most...).  There were problems with my IDE as well which meant having to choose a different keyboard activation code.

In short this tool is not for me, and this time after a few weeks I can say I gave it a fair shake.

However I would say that Buzz and Peter were very responsive to my issues, and enough people get value out of it that I would still recommend it to others to try.  Just because it doesn't work for me doesn't mean it won't work for you.