It depends on what you are trying to achieve by having multiple projects that you need to work simultaneously with. In IDEA 3.0 you may specify different output paths for each of the source paths. This way you may have a single project combining a lot of different source branches. For instance, this is very useful when developing EJBs, application clients and other server-side components that are parts of a single enterprise application. Since they should be compiled (and resources get copied) to different paths, though it's useful to have them in one project (refactorings are project-wide this way).

Best regards,

Eugene Belyaev

my approach is that i keep the minimum packages in my Project, and add all the rest of the project files in to the SourcePath.

now, your project pane is not cluttered, and you can go to any file in your source structure by pressing Ctrl-N and Alt-N (for non project files)...

I just run two copies of IDEA. It uses a fair bit of RAM, but since RAM is about $0.25/MB, it's worth it.