I congratulate anyone who can get one of those shell replacements working.  I tried a couple and they were more trouble (for me anyway) than they were worth.

For those who still use the explorer shell, though, Konfabulator http://www.konfabulator.com/ is now available for free.  This app lets you put "widgets" on your desktop for clocks, weather, calendars, whatever.  I've always liked a naked desktop - icons annoy me but a sterile picture is too boring.  So here's my desktop with a clock, calendar, weather and (way up in the upper right) system monitor.

I never get bored with my desktop.  I just change pictures if I get bored with it.  This is what my desktop has looked like for quite awhile now.



No icons, nice, clean and simple.  If you look very, very, very closely, you can just make out my taskbar on the right hand side of the screen that is set to "Auto-Hide". The only thing I'd like is perhaps an application that randomizes my backgrounds from a set of pictures on start up, but I can easily live without it.

All i can say is you people must have nothing to do on the computer because i never see my desktop. i am either flying in Flightsim, sending or receiving emails or browsing the web among 101 other jobs. When do you get the time to sit back and look at a desktop.