Don’t ask me how but I ended up here, where I found that my slightly guilty fondness for gimickery in my windows environment was also:

"pointless frippery that would bloat the binary to no useful purpose"

... but I also found links to PowerMenu and Glass2k, woo hoo!. After downloading both I found that PowerMenu seems to put less of a strain on CPU memory - but Glass2k alows you to make the taskbar transparent!!. How do you make a descision like that?

Frippery rules!!