A great "long-term" memory, and visual recognition work well for font management.
But seriously, There are a few standard fonts that I use:
Verdana
Helvetica
Impact
Arial Black
Yahoo!
and a few others that are always in my memory banks.
If I cannot use one of those fonts on a project, I will scroll through the rest of them.
After browsing your list for a while, you'll start to remember which font looks like what, and you'll get faster at it.
I'm sure there are a ton of font managers out there, however, I find it just as easy to remember which ones I use the most.
