I am trying to assign a hotkey to open a folder in snow leopard. For example, in windows i could simply press the Windows+E to open the My Computer folder (or manually assign whatever folder i wanted to open). Is there a way to get this same behavior in OSX?

I want to be able to launch applications, and open folder with my own keyboard mappings.

For launching applications I use automator, create a service that receives no input to 'launch application' (from the utilities library). Then i can assign a keyboard shortcut to this service. Now i can launch applications with keyboard shortcuts.

I still dont know how to open a folder. I know this can be done using quicksilver - but am looking for an organic approach that does not require any additional installs.