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You can. If you are that desperate for clickable areas, but it does make things cluttered.
I'm pretty sure you can do the same thing with KDE and even Windows to be honest (er no, scrub that last one), I'm actually using Xoblite as my shell in XP, which is Blackbox based.

Indeed. I used to change my shell every other week or so for a few months, just to try something new and tinker.

I found that LiteStep was a PITA to use. Too much playing with config files.

SharpE was a decent and simple to use. Same with geOShell.

AstonShell is a nice shell with lots of features, but it costs money and it can't do anything that LiteStep can't.

I tired BlackBox for windows when it was first released and liked it quite a bit. Very minimalistic.

There is quite a lot of shells to choose from, though, sadly, not as many as there used to be. DarkStep was a stripped down LiteStep shell that I REALLY liked, but the maintainer abandoned the project many, many years ago. Seranade looked promising, but the site doesn't even exist anymore.

And I run blackbox on my windows machine. Though, I can do have other options, too, such as Xoblite (a blackbox fork), LiteStep, or Aston, which I find consumes even less memory (abouy 3-4 mb worth), while giving me fancy plugins, transparency, and all that fun stuff. Hell, even GNUstep/Etoile does windows. And I'm pretty sure I've seen WindowMaker ports, as well.

Oh, yes, and you can also strip down windows by either hacking up the registry, or using fancy third-party Frontends. I recall sliming 9x to a 45mb install, and XP to about 1-200mb, by stripping out unecessary components and services (e.g. Outlook, Mediaplayer, explorer, etc). I haven't tried Vista as of yet, nor do I intend to in the near future, but I know that many of the alternate WMs havebeen ported.

Really, I'm trying hard, but I can't quite seem to get your point. Windows has had the option to swap outthe default explorer shell in favour of another, since NT4, and the process is painless. So, with that in mind, if your criticism is a fair one, would it not be just as fair to argue that Ubuntu is bloated because it installs Gnome by default?

Of course it isn't, you can't, however, have it both ways.

FWI: I'm not fanboying, but I do use a Windows desktop alongside my Unix boxen boxen, and I realise that each has their strengths and weaknesses, each their uses, and not one is unilaterally "better" than the other in all respects.

I've started to switch my shell in windows.

So far I've used:

• LiteStep: removed - it just didn't work well with my X-Mouse setup (via TweakUI)
• SharpE
• Xoblite

I'm at the point of trying the pluggins from Xoblite's site. The base is ok, but I would like to see some other things... like multiple desktops AND, more importantly to me right now, replacing the standard window-title-bar and being able to scroll it with a pluggin from Xoblite.

SharpE is very, very nice and worth a gander or two.

http://xoblite.net/
Granted it's not been updated for almost a year now, but I use it at work for the very same reason. I use the edge flipping and mousewheel plugins with the pager so I have a lot of flexibility in how I move from desktop to desktop. It gives me Unix like interface and with Cygwin (which also has an option to run X windows but I've not played with it much) augmenting my command line, I'm almost happy with it.
I've used various Blackbox for Windows branches, and xoblite seems to be the best of them. Fast and stable; the only times I've had problems with it, could be traced back to another program.
Plus there is the added bonus that my Windows only co-workers can't figure out how to navigate around my machine.

There are limits yes. Most notably, editing the menu (or any kind of preferences) needs you to edit a config file, and right-clicking the taskbar doesn't work for closing windows.

But I deployed a severe addiction to the root menu (right-clicking the windows desktop is a trauma now) and it has some feature that windows misses completely, like a decent virtual desktop management, and some cool plugins (being able to customize the window decorations rocks, and also being able to roll up a window).

As mini-review, I have to say that it serves my purposes well, so I'll give it a 8 (btw, I use xoblite http://xoblite.net/)

In the case of the Linux desktops, you could probably hack something together that would work without those components. Arguably you could in Windows too, I guess, by having the Task Manager open (since it allows you to run programs by filename). But Windows is designed as a distribution to use IE as the main shell program. If you kill IE in Windows (go to Task Manager, find "explorer.exe", and kill it - or just crash it, there are plenty of ways to do it), you lose the desktop, the Start menu, and the taskbar. IE is the shell that most people interact with. (It's worth pointing out that "iexplore.exe" is a stub program that essentially just runs "explorer.exe".)

Ah, but Explorer is not the only shell for Windows, there's Litestep, Blackbox for Windows (and its offspring), and for the truly hardcore, progman.exe :-) (it still runs on W2K last I tried, although you do have to create all the groups yourself, and no system tray too)

Also try the bb4win 'alternate flavours' bblean and xoblite