am I one of the few (the only one?!?) that runs XP with all the eye-candy cr*p turned off ('classic' view)?
I never liked the 'classic' look of Win95/98/ME (boring grey blocky stuff, even worse than standard WB3.1). But I also don't like the standard (blue) look of XP, so I rather use the built-in silvery theme.
For the rest, the only eye candy on my desktop is the wallpaper that I use (mostly pictures that I took myself on holidays etc). I've turned off all fading/scrolling menus and other 3D-ish crap. But that's mostly because to modern day standards my pc is somewhat slow and lacking in memory (and I prefer using free physical RAM above virtual memory - it's slow enough as it is now).