Most customizable GUI?

[Artician]

I've just finished building my first Mini-ITX form factor PC. I plan to turn this into a little emulator box, but I want a completely custom looking OS. I know anything is possible with Linux, but due to some application requirements it has to be a Windows OS.
What I tried in the past was enabling active desktop, getting ride of all icons, start menu, and task bar. Then I create a whole bunch of custom icons for each application I wanted to run, and made my desktop active with HTML and tried to use these new icons to launch the programs I wanted. There was no trace of windows visually, but what stopped me was active desktops inability to launch .exe's through HTML (which makes sense). That's just to give you an idea of what I'm going for.

Can someone recommend what WinOS is the most flexible, and if any "skinning" or shell editing applications are highly recommended?

As always, thank you very much for the opinions and feedback!

 

[P0ldy]

Maybe this http://www.hamar.sk/sphere/

 

[Cobalt]

You can use XP then use StyleXP or the other many progs out there.

 

[Artician]

Thanks for the replies.

I went with Win2k because it has such a smaller install than XP. StarDock was recommended and makes some good customization apps and I decided to go with them for altering the GUI. It's only an advanced skin, as opposed to an entirely different shell, but they seem pretty thorough.

Thanks again for the suggestions.

 

[minofifa]

this is a pretty neat program. it needs some work though. its not fluid enough for me to put windows on the sphere. I'd like to be able to push the minimize button in a window and have it go to the back ground.