One extremely helpful finding in my testing career has been the user of a database to track test cases.  If any tool (besides my keen mental abilities j/k) has become extremely useful in my testing repertoire it has been the manual test case database.  My current tool is in MS Access and lacks all the bells and whistles I would like. One of my goals is to write my own front end using C# and a back end database in SQL.  Well we can all dream but the idea is any future changes could be designed and implemented easier by me then waiting on a developer to complete the tasks.  Ohh well one can dream right.