that certainly isn't a ringing endorsement..
to add the story of my ever-changing window managers: i think i've settled on pekwm (which i've been using for a week and a bit now). it's very customizable (and the config files are really simple to boot), and though it isn't a tiled window manager by design it can do tiling/grouping quite nicely. and another thing! the themes seem pretty easy to make, so i might have a go at making one of my own. but for now i'll stick to downloading themes from hewphoria.com and customizing them as i see fit.
and now something to complain about... apparently v2.4 was the last version of pypanel--they're done with actively developing it--so now that i've installed python 2.5 it's fucked up. i could do a "pacman --sync python2.4" and run it with "python24 /usr/bin/pypanel" but that seems like a bad solution to me. i don't want out-dated stuff that's just going to cause me problems
i'm thinking of looking to perlpanel or fbpanel next, or maybe i'll just use xfce4-panel..