this has to be the most useful and awesome post I've seen on macosx.com. I've been searching fruitlessly for a way to replace the finder, but nothing seemed "good enough". I'd toyed with my OSX Server cd trying to get the server finder (which imho looks better than the new version) and got it mostly working (well, launching anyway) but I hate hacks.
the only other useful customization I can think of is skinning OSX (officially, since Apple keeps killing the ability to skin when folks figure out how to), but one step at a time
thanks for this tip!