I really can't believe it's already been so long since 0.6... I guess the summer has sort of rushed by. Anyway, Start++ definitely isn't dead, and in fact the next update should be released very soon. I almost uploaded 0.7 tonight, but I want to run it myself for a few days to make sure the new hooking mechanism is as reliable as I believe it is.
That's right, I rewrote the core Start menu hooking functionality yet again. While Start++ remains a C# application, there's now a very small (about 8k) unmanaged DLL that hooks into Explorer. Benefits include vastly increased reliability for the hook (the old method, which relied on automation APIs, would often "lose track" of the Start menu) and some other side benefits (reduced memory usage, faster, and no more provoking IE 7's crashing bug, etc). I've also streamlined a few things, added some additional error handling code, and started to pave the way for some future improvements. Oh, and I think things may work better for non-English systems, though I don't have one to try at the moment.
With that major hurdle out of the way (hopefully for good), I'll start focusing on features and cleaning up some thing (like the scripting implementation) for 1.0. After 1.0 I plan to add support for other languages in the Start++ UI, which is when I'll start enlisting some help for the translations (thanks again to those who have offered!). I don't want to do it yet because the UI is going to change pretty soon...