My apologies, some of the links in this post appear dead.
I may fix them at some point!
Fluxbox is my windowmanager of choice for my *nix systems. Its small, fast and ultimately configurable. I’ve been spending a while now tailoring it to my needs and wants – here’s how Ive done it:

~/.fluxbox/startup
This file contains what programs you can load before fluxbox starts up. I load my wallpaper, several apps and some utilities. You can download my modified startup file here.

~/.fluxbox/fbpager

In the bottom right hand corner of the screen you can see my pager, showing my workspaces.
This is using the application ‘fbpager’ and its all configured by its own config file. You can download mine here. fbpager is called by the fluxbox startup file above.

Idesk

Idesk is a neat little app which will let you place icons on the desktop. You can load it in your ~/.fluxbox/startup file. I just use it for my essential apps like Iceweasel, Gaim, Thunar (a nice file manager) & my mail client. It has its own directory and configuration files. ~/.idesktop/ideskrc this is the main config file, and you place a file for each icon like this: ~/.idesktop/Gaim.lnk

Gkrellm

I am a big fan of Gkrellm. You can see this on the top right of the screenshot. It sits there and monitors all kinds of stuff. There are some nifty plugins available. It’s useful for monitoring mount points, disk space, temperatures and its ultimately configurable with lots of themes and plugins.