Because I get bored with Windows but don’t have a spare box to run any more interesting operating system, I’ve been tinkering with LiteStep recently (via this great installer. It’s an alternative desktop environment for Windows based on AfterStep (which, in turn, is based on NextStep). People call these “alternative shells” but I can’t think of a GUI as a shell (to me, “shell” implies a command-line/terminal environment). Anyway. I have some minor experience with AfterStep, so it has been fun to tinker with it. I’m still trying to find a theme that works for me, as I don’t have time at the moment to roll my own. The default theme that comes with the installer is pretty good, but it doesn’t let you drag desktop icons (they stay auto arranged). There’s a way to hack that feature in, but it didn’t work for me.
If LiteStep doesn’t work out, I might look into bblean, or some of the others that are mentioned at coredump.org (NeX, NeXMIN, and Bluebox). I don’t really have time to thinker with these things, but sometimes I do anyway. It would be nice to find one that’s more stable than the default XP Pro desktop environment. So far, LiteStep seems stable. And it makes installing new themes and other dependencies very easy and fairly idiot proof.