How do you avoid over-populating the PATH Environment Variable in Windows?

Question

I would like to know what are the approaches that you use to manage the executables in your system. For example I have almost everything accessible through the command line,

Answer 1

In case anyone's interested...

I find I never really need all those paths at once, so I create a bunch of "initialization" batch files which modify the path accordingly.

For example, if I wanted to do some C++ development in Eclipse, I would do:

> initmingw
> initeclipse
> eclipse

This is also handy for avoiding conflicts between executables with the same name (such as the C++ and D compilers, which both have a make.exe).

My batch files typically look like this:

@echo off
set PATH=C:\Path\To\My\Stuff1;%PATH%
set PATH=C:\Path\To\My\Stuff2;%PATH%

I find this approach relatively clean and have yet to run into any problems with it.