But what if you want a start menu shortcut (needed to launch !), but not one on the desktop?

That would work well.

In an ideal world, perhaps we'd have some kind of lightweight workflow model, with items moving through a user-defined sequence of states (eg. 'survey', 'read' etc).

To be more specific: the Mendeley reader's text is less black, and more fuzzy than Acrobats. This is on an LCD screen, Windows + ClearType enabled.

Thanks for this info. As you say, it would be handy to be able to search on the other fields. If such a thing is ever implemented, don't forget item Type. At present there doesn't seem to be a means of limiting a search just to, say, books.

That would be a great start. With a view to the future, perhaps you could see if it would be possible to run metadata extraction (when/if it becomes available) over existing Mendeley documents.

robert -- what's also missing is easy ways to attach files in the first place. Think of the full-text html versions of papers that appear in many journals and databases these days. It's easy enough to download 1 pdf and attach it to a Mendeley entry (or create the entry via metadata extraction). But a full-text html version could be quite a few files.

Zotero has a nice way of managing this with its snapshots. Perhaps Mendeley needs something similar?

Very important. PDF-centricity has a limited lifespan. Check out all the new stuff happening with institutional repositories etc. As peter sefton (http://ptsefton.com) points out, academia is really the last hold-out for pdf as an exchange format, and it probably won't hold out for long.