Shell Replacement

Anyone have any opinions on the Shell replacements out and about?

I tried Aston but it was too limiting. Then I tried Litestep but it seems alot of sites are down. It's been hard to get started in it so I can make my own themes.

Are there any others?

I'm looking for a shell repleacement too, but i'm looking for something that won't eat as much CPU as the default win shell, and the games won't crash either. Tried using: Talisman (killed too many memory), bbLean, BlackBox (both crashed when i started a game).
i don't mind writing codes, as long as there's a sample for it :D