Anyone know of a nautilus/konquerer equivalent file manager for
windows, that supports tabbed views (to save having a million explorer
windows open)?

Sadly limited to using windows at work, but not having tabs in
explorer is really doing my nut in ...

I will try to install some of these file managers for Windows in Wine...

KDE for Windows is just KDE's applications and not the desktop environment.

taking a look into xplorer2 - see how it goes.

Well, finally managed to get someone to install Xplorer2 (the lite
version) for me at work (don't have windows at home and am tied up by
the security measures we have in place at work, so I needed to get
permission from the IT guys, and then get them to do the job for me).

So far, it's looking good - just got to get used to the tabs being at
the bottom of the screen, rather than at the top ...

KDE is available for Windows. Its file manager is called Dolphin.

http://windows.kde.org/

Does it have K3B ? Can it be used with KDE shut down ? I have read about KDE
for Windows. But, for God's sake, it does not make sense. Or, maybe i should
test it first. KDE is a resource hog, but if it is fast on Windows, why not ?