project management software

i've been searching in vain lately for software that will magically make my projects organized. i'm most interested in using network-based methods, though these seem to be out of fashion since their peak in the 60s. the best book i've been able to find so far on this is 'network-based management systems (pert/cpm)' by archibald and yilloria (available pretty cheap on amazon). it's so old that most of the computational stuff is probably worthless; just monte carlo the thing and go home. the thing is, i don't care so much about resource leveling, since i'm the only resource. i do care about uncertain time estimates, but i would like to go beyond that to account for uncertain success for task alternatives. i tend to do more r&d type projects, where there is more than one way to approach a problem but not all approaches will work. i want my project plan to help me decide what to try first, either to eliminate unlikely possibilities or to confirm prerequisites quickly. i think this can fit the old network methodology if i use boolean inputs at event nodes or (probably better) i use a hierarchical network where multiple approaches are abstracted as a higher-level activity. i can't believe no one has done this before, but i can't find any refs. i guess the typical gantt/work breakdown structure has a hierarchical structure, so maybe i can take advantage of that when interfacing project management software. taskjuggler uses text format input files for gantt-chart-like dependencies that i might reasonably generate from a network topology. that would allow me to make reports that are intelligible to other people, but i would still have to write all the code for the network operations, especially dealing with probabilistic time and success representations (probably unavoidable anyway). openproj.org is another one worth looking at. relatively feature-rich, including hosting and (i think) some m$ project compatibility. probably this or taskjuggler would be the best to work with. definitely best for simple and/or one-offs; i've used it this way before, on windows and linux. kplato is less than impressive, and i saw some mention of them wanting to merge with taskjuggler anyway. www.sharedplan.com offers hosted planning. nice for security and collaboration, but i'm not sure what exactly their features are.