Thanks for refreshing my memory. Those were pretty cool programs back then.

I definetly remember Windowsblinds too (and geez, it seems they're still around ...).

I was into LiteStep, which basically was a shell replacement for explorer.exe.

I'm also reminded how trivially easy it was to configure Win9x to use a different shell: you'd just edit system.ini under [boot] to say shell=litestep.exe and you were done.

Here are some screenshots:

[0] https://www.stardock.com/products/windowblinds/wb-aug00g.jpg

[1] http://litestep.net/snapshot1.png