There's is as you say a lot of options, both in eyecandy and functionality. Eye-candy wise the 2 "essentials" are VisualPrefs and Birdie2k, but personally I also use other things like PowerWindowsNG (which lets you drag windows out of screen as well as a bunch of other stuff), beautifonts (anti -aliased fonts), AA (another anti aliasing font patch (neither is perfect, but both together works ok)). There's also of course MUI, defiantely worth registering in my opinion. PowerIcons is another popular one, which gives the user the ability to use 32bit color png icons, but you lose the 2nd icon image. Personally I prefer to use a nice set on glow icons (kens icons atm), which can look 95% as good as png icons if done right, and you get to keep the 2nd image. Each to thier own though. Another thing which has popped up very recently is AfA OS, which adds a few extra features to AOS3.x (proper anti aliased fonts and alpha channel for datatypes for example).
