As much as I’d like to sever all ties from Windows, there are a variety of reasons that I can’t. On the bright side, Windows 7 is coming out this year, and purports to fix some of the problems with Vistas well as making some long overdue UI changes. One of ‘em is the new taskbar, which I’m actually interested in.
Of course, I’ll have to wait until October. Even then it’s rumored to be comparable in price to Vista, an expensive proposition if you have a machine that works fine already. If you’ve got Vista, you might be in luck! I do not, so I’m not sure what my plan is.
However! You don’t have to wait to get some of those features, as some enterprising fellow on the Internet is writing various apps that port newer features of Windows to older versions.
In particular, I’ve been using ViGlance. I’ve felt for a while that the taskbar is untenable with more than a few applications open, so this solves that problem nicely by grouping them under icons and, on hover, allowing you to choose from a list of windows that app.
It’s not complete yet: you can’t pin programs to the Dock Taskbar, and there are no previews on hover. Even without these features, though, I would recommend it.