My current desktop setup.

Looks pretty cool doesnt it?  It's an interactive Heads Up Display (HUD), with current time, date, weather info, network and disk usage statistics, functional media played controls, links to commonly used folders, programs, and websites, and more.  I love the look and functionality of it.  So much cooler than having icons cluttering up my desktoip.

To achieve this you need 2 things, rainmeter and a skin called jarvis.  Rainmeter is available at: http://code.google.com/p/rainmeter/  and the jarvis skin can be found at: http://browse.deviantart.com/?qh=&section=&q=jarvis+rainmeter+skin#/d36eee6

Once you download and install both of those, you can customize the skin by right-clicking different sections and going to variants, which will allow you to open up a .ini file where the variables are stores, so if you installed photoshop(for example) to a different directory than default, you can point the link to your installation.  You can customize all the clickable links and point them to wherever you like.

Unfortunately the media player controls seem to only work with winamp, but i installed winamp just so that part of the HUD would work.  It was worth it in my opinion.  I might still do some more customizing on this later, but we'll see.  Let me know what you think.