LiteStep

Windows allows a program other than explorer.exe to be the shell; changing the Shell value under Winlogon in the registry is all it takes. Francis Gastellu used that in 1997 for LiteStep, which replaced the taskbar, the Start menu and the desktop icons with what he missed from AfterStep on Linux: a wharf of icons along the edge, popup menus on right-click, a VWM module with virtual desktops, and a step.rc file where everything was configured in text. The rest was modules anyone could write, and the look was decided entirely by the theme, so the same installation could resemble NeXTSTEP, an aircraft cockpit or almost nothing at all.

The code was opened under the GPL when Gastellu left the project in 1998, and around the turn of the century LiteStep themes were a genre of their own on deviantART and customize.org, alongside Winamp skins. Blackbox for Windows and bbLean took the minimalist part of the audience after 2001, and first XP's compatibility problems and then Vista's new limits on what a shell was allowed to do made the modules hard to keep alive. LiteStep 0.25 arrived in 2010 from a new group of developers and is in practice the last release; the idea lives on in tools that replace parts of the Windows shell rather than the whole thing.