IMDb 250 - choose your favourite word (or two) from each title listed; starting at 1 then going down.
Project Godfather? Project Cuckoo? Project Strangelove?–try explaining that to the clients!
How about referring your projects with names of Flower-- like
- Project Rose
- Project Orchid
- Project Tulip and bla…bla
Aw, c’mon, nobody’s going to take a stab at identifying the project names I mentioned at the front of the post?
The way you phrased it I assumed that they were all from a single set.
Machine names derived from local bars and pubs. it’s handy in a college town because all the new hires will know the names and there are plenty of names to choose from. 
Lorem Ipsum words, obviously.
At the risk of coming across as one of the “Ho Hum, you are all stupid” group that Craig coined, I find it amazing how much passion people put into project names - really, what value do they add? At my former employer, we had project names assigned for a suite release - all of a sudden there were meetings after meetings where expensive management (i.e.: measured as high in salary with no statement as to the wealth of any of their other attributes) were sitting around arguing about what names the projects should have. This endeavour, and the offshoot documents, emails, further meetings, re-naming of projects, bumping of renamings up to the executive for approval, etc., probably cost the company tens of thousands of dollars. How did that serve the stockholders of the company? The reality of the matter wasn’t that anything was wrong with the initial names but rather the QA guy, a racing car fan, wanted all the projects he worked on named after F1 racing teams, one of the development managers desperately trying to prove he had some intelligence somewhere wanted all his projects named after some physics phenomena, etc. These were pure ego-driven endeavours that brought no value to the company and served only to appease a few small minded individuals (one of whom quit to go work for another company about 2 months after getting his way).
Over the years I’ve been part of teams that have used project name themes such as:
- Famous Bobs
- Chainsaw manufacturers (‘chopping’ down the competition)
- Beer
The latter is a favorite, because there’s opportunity for the management team to show their support by creating a ‘beer wall’ of the appropriately named project. 
I love how these types of posts seem to end up, one group going “Ho Hum, you are all stupid” and the other group enthusiastically involved, shooting up new ideas and having a great time of it all. See the security post in this same blag for an even more extreme variation.
Sports teams
For one of our custom apps we use breakfast cereal names. They meet the “client friendly” and can also imply something about the contents of the release. For example a completely revamped version for a new client was called “Lucky Charms” and an upcoming version that has not a lot of end user stuff, just lots of architectural changes is called “Bran Buds” - you know, doesn’t taste great, but good for you
“Famous” golf courses. For the non-golfers in our group, which is the vase majority of us, golf course names have the benefit of being entirely context-free. What preconceived associations do I have with Doral or Troon? None.
I started out with machines named after dinosaur sites and discoverers: ComoBluff, Wyoming, DrinkerCope, SheepCreek, etc.
DrinkerCope was somewhat misinterpreted by my colleagues at the time…
Now I am posting from Tsunami, with a collection of virtual machines called Sasami, Tokemi, and Washu (plus the standard Microsoft release names for all my reference test OS virtual machines, such as Whistler, etc). As for my current projects: I’ll save that for when my main website goes up(;P).
Well, of course all my personal stuff is just Stu+something (Stutwo, Stumu, Studos, Stumpy, Stumby, Stumbo, Stucks).
One really nice set for boxes since logos et al have already been made for you is the original attractions of Epcot Center (Horizons, Communicore, World of Motion).
For codenames, look no farther than the back of Duran Duran’s Greatest (Electric Barbarella, Wild Boys, Girls on Film).
When I make something quick, dumb and empty (temporary folder to test path recognition, etc) it usually comes out as “LOL”, followed by “omg”, “wtf”.
Most of my work involves a client that already has a name so I just use that throughout the code. I do have my own little library of helpful things that I always re-use that I call ‘Magnum’. In addition to that, my personal computer is called ‘Gemini’ and my two external harddrives are called ‘Castor’ and ‘Pollux’. My workgroup is ‘MILKY WAY’.
I have an old Advanced Dungeous Dragons encyclopedia of Dieties Demigods in my basement at home that I use for picking out codenames. I usually open a page at random and just grab the first one I see. No one on my team knows this is where the ‘freaky’ codenames come from!
Some recent ones:
Geb
Draupnir
Freke
Roofdrak
Torc
Hunapu
Mjolnir
Apep
Ebisu
Loviatar
Modi
Stoneribs
Last one was a favorite and remains our dedicated in-house, web-based issue reporting backend!
I like the Shipping Regions one.
Last names of famous fictional detectives (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detective_fiction#Famous_fictional_detectives)
Philosphers (could get tricky - no one wants to get stuck on Project Camus or Nietzsche)
Famous Scientists
Star Wars characters (Again, some names could be jinxed. Project Fett - that’s doomed for the Sarlaac pit, for sure.)