What is Emerge Desktop?

As stated in the general description, it is an alternate shell for Windows 2000 and above. You can replace your desktop completely (instead of just customizing the look of explorer).

Strong points for a "customizer":
* stable, light and fast interface
* you can choose what (and where) to have displayed the tasks, tray, etc
* each applet can have it's custom colour scheme
* all settings are configured through GUIs (no manual editing of .rc files)

Weak points:
* no bitmap skinning of applets
* no skins on menus

As they say an image speaks more than a thousand works, so take a look:

It can be as simple as this
http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?group_id=1145
27&ssid=19654

or as sofisticated as this


(and yes, this is Windows, not Linux! ;) )