There's a lot of really cool stuff out there that lets you customize Windows in various ways.  Stardock may make much of the popular/cool stuff but there's some neat stuff going on.  Here are some highlights of things I really enjoy looking at.

If you're into skinnable calendars, check out Rainlendar:

I don't tend to use Rainlendar that much since my DesktopX based calendars do the trick. But Rainlendar has a lot of very good features to make use of and has a lot more skins.

At the risk of being flogged, Winamp, which I personally think deserves a big share of the credit for getting skinning going (and certainly for coining the term "skin" for use in the GUI changing sense) is not quite as popular as it used to be.  But it's still getting some good stuff:

Windows Media Player skinning hasn't taken off that much but thanks to the efforts of The Skins Factory, which can be a pain in the butt on occasion does deliver some incredibly good stuff:

This is their Batman Begins skin. You can get it here.

Litestep used to be THE alternative shell for Windows. Unfortunately, it's been fading quite a bit in recent years.  Hey, Litestep advocates, let's see some cool new stuff! There's only been 9 themes uploaded to WinCustomize this year!  This reminds me that we really gotta start getting specific gallery moderators who are in charge of keeping their section alive. Stardock sections have advocates but we need to get advocates for the open source stuff too.

Meanwhile, DesktopX may do great when it comes to creating animated desktop objects and full-blown desktop "themes" but when it comes to widgets, it's Konfabulator's whipping boy.

That's a nice battery meter widget for Konfabulator. You can get that here. 

Meanwhile, the final proof that people are selectively insane, Kapsules, which is a freeware competitor to Konfabulator and has an identical feature set doesn't get nearly the widget support that Konfabulator gets (and yet people will scream about paying $20 for WindowBlinds) does get some pretty neat stuff:

Which you can get here.  I guess the model is that it's better to make free widgets for a $20 program than free widgets for something that is given away?

Speaking of free things that have tons of features, there's also Samurize:

Sure, it has a built in development environment and sure it has a ton of features and options but on the downside it's free..

AstonShell isn't free but it is pretty cool:

I like the program though I did get annoyed with one of its advocates that tried to argue that WindowBlinds was somehow "buggy and hard to use" while at the same time advocating an alternative shell whose themes requrie the user to do some serious surgery to make work on a given system.  If you use alternative shells, you can pretty much expect to have to customize a given theme to your liking. But for people who are serious about this, it's no biggie and they're pretty cool. I'd like to see WinCustomize eventually have an Aston section.  Comment here saying "We need an Astonshell you bastard Stardock people! Quit holding down the 'competition' with your bastard ways!" (or something to that effect). Though if you can't find a way to inject the word "Bastard" into your request then you're obviously not serious so don't waste our time...bastards.

A lot of people like AveDesk. But it still doesn't have its own website so instead its fans hang out, dominate Aqua-Soft. So it's hard to recommend it even though I like the author.

Remember Hoverdesk? Not much has happened with it for awhile which is a bummer because it was pretty darn cool. Something happened to its deviantART section, not sure what the deal is but it seems to be done.  HoverDesk was a competitor to Litestep/AstonShell but had some great themes thanks to Dangeruss.  Is the alternative shell scene dying?

One buttkicker who keeps moving forward is Jorge who runs Winstep.

WinStep makes a bunch of cool utilities such as NextStart and Workshelf.  Now, if we were like some Mac developers, we would say "Workshelf is a knock-off of ObjectDock.  But the truth is that we all got our ideas from NeXT back from the 1960s or whatever it was.  Workshelf is a tabbed program launcher.  NextSTART is a lot of things but ultimately is a highly configurable desktop menu replacement that is a lot like Stardock's own RightClick before those bastards at Stardock made RightClick. Bastards.

But Workshelf continues to move forward in development and there's sections available on WinCustomize.com.

And of course, how can we forget MSStyles which is one of the two popular visual style formats.  The other popular visual style format being that Windowsblind program from Starduck.  Since WindowBlinds users can use msstyles no problem if they have SkinStudio installed, one has to wonder why the heck we didn't put up a msstyle section on WinCustomize.  The time may come when we should do that.  If you want an msstyles section on WinCustomize, you need to make a comment saying "Hey, Stardock bastards, quit denying us an msstyles section..bastards!" 

The reason this will become a big deal is well, you know that Longhorn thingy? Next version of Windows and all? Well, the msstyles of today go bye bye. The only realistic way to run msstyles on Longhorn is going to be (wait for it) through conversion and since SkinStudio has had two years of time to figure out how to convert this stuff, that means that only through converting msstyles XP to WindowBlinds or msstyles Longhorn will those existing msstyles work on Longhorn.

I'd like to take this moment to publicly thank Snowman and Snidely and others who take the time to ask msstyles authors if they can convert their msstyles into WindowBlinds format. And while 90% of msstyles continue to be "Look, it's Luna but now it's red!" or "Hey, look, it's MacOS X but with the buttons on the right" there are still some pretty cool msstyles out there.

Example is this one called Black Mesa. It's over at deviantART. But like I said, if you download and install SkinStudio (and run it once) you can use this in WindowBlinds as well. Of course, if you run it under WindowBlinds it'll suffer from things like hardware acceleration, the ability to change its color/hue, and skin non-theme aware programs (this is where you write in the comments area "Hey, Stardock bastard, quit plugging your stuff in this non Stardock oriented article..bastard!").

Seriously though, those who are getting permission and making WB versions of msstyles are doing people a favor and should be appreciated. The WindowBlinds UIS format is like Noah's arc when Longhorn comes around. Longhorn's msstyles abilities will be quite cool with alpha blending and such (though for support/branding reasons it'll be encrypted -- unlike msstyles on XP which were documented) so while there may be some new msstyle type way of doing things, one thing we can be pretty sure of, existing msstyles will have to be converted.  And we'll make sure we can convert them to whatever (this is where you add "Dammit, I mean it, quit plugging your crap, don't make me come over there!").

Well that's enough plugging for other programs for now.  BTW, next time someone complains about me writing this stuff, remind them that "Hey, bastard, why don't you write your own article then?" I tell ya, people will sit back and knit-pick me writing articles on skinning because it's my day job forgetting that they certainly could write up their own views and I'd happily feature it.  I'm into this stuff enough that I made it part of my career.  Of course, I also write video games and..shockingly, I actually play video games made by other people and (gasp) talk about video games made by other people too. It's a real scandal I tell ya!