I use the "Start Automatically" feature for a hand-full of apps, and find it extremely useful. However, I occasionally want to be able to open the PortableApps.com Platform WITHOUT running all my apps set to start automatically.
Some reasons I want this:
I accidentally closed the platform, so all the apps that would launch automatically are already running.
Need quick access to only a few apps, but don't want to wait for (and have to manually close) all the auto-start apps.
I think this could be accomplished with holding a key while launching the Platform; "Shift" would make sense to me.