Well, in CB it appeared you want to run on both win32 and linux. And you want to run more than one app. On linux, the following might do the trick:

1. Start your xserver without any winmanager or app.
2. Write yourself a switcher, with nice big icons.
3. Put this switcher with -geometry in the left upper corner of your screen.
4. This switcher starts some predefined apps, and place them somewhere on the available space on the right, on top of other apps, but not touching your switcher.
5. If the switcher must switch to a running app, the switcher send an XEvent to that app, to call it on top.

You could port the whole darned thing to win32. For that, you need an Xserver, and cygwin, to run your apps in the XServer. The XServer is the tricky thing, as there are no good free XServers. They all have their disadvantages. It should be possible to run a XFree86 on cygwin, but I couldn't get it working a few months ago. MI/X from http://www.microimages.com is a shareware alternative, but sadly enough it starts a window manager right away.

Hope this gets you started,

Jeroen
"We are not alone"(FZ)

Update: Maybe you just can forget about XServers in win32, and keep a app running that checks for forbidden apps, and kill them. And update the windows position of the 'good' apps every cycle... see Win32::Process in the active state distro.