I've looked at ratpoison... I normally dig minimalistic approaches but this is a little too much for me. Ion does everything ratpoison does, and more, and looks much better. The extra .3 second it takes to start up I can deal with.

Here are window managers in the order that I used them

KDE - basic, good for noobs, but the default theme just bugs me; I had to change it. Apps such as kopete, konsole, and konqueror work faster under KDE

icewm - good, lightweight wm; very minimalist

Enlightenment - I didn't like it; it seemed like more eye candy than functionality

windowmaker - very fun toy; much more usable then Enlightenment, but I wasted a lot of time getting good dock apps

xfce - I liked it, but I moved on

gnome - Firefox seems to load faster in gnome and I like that. I don't really use all of its features as a desktop environment, though.

I'm currently using KDE but planning to switch to one of the others; probably icewm or gnome. Actually, I'm currently in Windows because I needed to use ndoc and don't have Wine set up.

No sawfish users? It's by far the one I liked most of all I tried.

The current Enlightenment isn't all that wonderful (though I did use it for quite some time). However, if you look into the next version, it looks quite bad ass (not just on an eye candy level, but also in terms of the technology... That's why it's taking them forever).