I got tried of looking at my windows start button and task bar and desided to change that. You know make windows not look like windows anymore. So a found a program called LiteStep. It's pretty neat. With it I made windows xp look like the KDE shell, but I can still run my windows applications.
what is your favorite shell replacement/enhancement?
but i think that the "start" button looks good, it was nice!
LiteStep is just another alternitive shell. that's fine if you like it.
TweakUI is all I really need. I don't care for fanciness or something different. For what it is the taskbar works just fine.
I used to use LiteStep under Windows 98 - the fancy TurtleSoup II theme - really a treat to the eyes... and I mean futuristic 
The later versions for 2000/XP have good themes as well.
Prefer ObjectBar + ObjectDock for an OS X look though. the fun part about the windows start bar is when you can get a hexeditor and ( I know this sounds dumb but it is really satisfying ) and you can change all sorts of stuff in the explorer.exe file. Stuff like that quite fun indeed.
Oh man, I haven't used LiteStep since I was in the dorms and wanted to discourage other people from using my computer 
I'd use it now, however I haven't found any good themes anymore. The theme I used back then was K-Gnome. The LiteStep helped reduce the resource hogging of the explorer shell, however the windows blind theme that came with K-Gnome probably made it equal to the explorer shell resource hogging
