I'm trying to do something very simple that, of course, has turned out to be kind of hard.

I have a list of ~400 items. I want to tag each item with a series of descriptive words and then instantly pull up item sub-sets matching one or more specified tags. I don't need to associate any text or files to each item, although if I could easily do so, all the better.

I've found only one program to fit this bill: Tobu - http://tobu.lightbird.net

Unfortunately, it looks as if Tobu isn't being maintained, and the program has some niggling little problems that make me reluctant to use it.

I know full-blown outliners like MyInfo have tagging functionality. But I just want the tags, nothing more.

Is there such a little program out there?

You might want to have a look at Total Organizer to see if it will do what you want.

http://www.konradp.com/products/organizer/

Personal Knowbase (http://www.bitsmithsoft.com/ is a tag-based note organiser.

Bob, what do you mean by 'items'? I assumed that you meant files in the beginning, but from further reading the context this doesn't seem to be the case.

If you are referring to text (rich, with images or otherwise) then by far Evernote has the best tagging capability I have used.

I'm referring (in this case) to restaurants, each of which I'd like to tag with such identifiers as cuisine type, price range, location, etc., etc., so that I could quickly retrieve lists of restaurants matching defined tag criteria.

Personal Knowbase looks good (thanks for pointing it out!). I see it has been discussed here before and I should have checked the archives before posting my question.

Is there anything out there better than Personal Knowbase for my little project?

Alexander - Evernote would probably work but it's way too 'heavy' for my limited task. I liked Tobu, initially, because it took up very few system resources and quickly opened with a hotkey. CintaNotes is another option - and a good one - but I use it for another purpose and don't want to mix things up.

If you don't have too many tag categories, you could just add tag identifiers to file names: For example, for French cuisine, add something like #cF to the file name. Then use file search on #cF.