This is mostly to interest of Damian as he and I have talked about it before, but I'm sure somebody else could use this, too.
http://www.dtrleisure.com/bztk/index.html
You can select as many files as you want at once, let's just pick an arbitrary number, how about thirty?
So you select your thirty files and select the type of compression that you want, and voila! You have thirty zip files (or ACE, RAR, etc.) Note that these aren't multidisk archives, they are individual compressed files. I've been looking for a decent program that does this for a while.
The program may do multidisk archives, I haven't messed around with it too much yet.
Unfortunately, I've been unable to locate the crack and/or serial for version 2.04, which is the current version.