Are there any "slimmer" GUIs besides X? Perhaps somthing along the lines of Windows that would combine X's concepts of both client and server?

Y Windows? What kind of hardware are you trying to run this on? There is Embedded X which I'd image would be stripped down sufficiently to run well on PDAs and other handheld devices. You could use DirectFB the dfb port of GTK to try and run everything that you need. Probably wouldn't be fun though. You might just be looking for a slimmer window manager to run on X as it's not all that resource hungry.

Need to post some more information bud.

Not sure what you mean by "along the lines of windows"
The x window system is the server and provides the basic framework for a GUI environment: drawing and moving windows on the screen and interacting with a mouse and keyboard.

The clients are the desktop environments like KDE and Gnome and windows managers like Fluxbox, Blackbox WindowMaker and many more. All of the windows managers mentioned are slimmer then KDE or Gnome. Windows managers can be either standalone or part of a desktop environment.

Search the site and google for more info.

I am running Redhat 7.3 in a 8mb machine with only 1gb of HD space. I am running twm to save room on the hard drive (no kde or gnome).

Free says:
total=45932, used=44844, free=1088

Shared=0

swap total 68535, used=22360, free=46176

Hmmm, you're going to struggle with hardware like that. What do you use in X? There might be command line tools that'll get the job done for you, that would be the way to go

Actually, I use mostly Xterms to write C programs for console use. I could get away with multiple consoles or the 'screen' program. I like to play solitare (Kpat or SOL or Aisleriot) and Xtetris. I also like rogue and hack and nethack, and I don't need X for those. Direct Frame Buffer looks interesting, it seems to have a terminal program.

Get more ram. If it's a pentium 1 you could probably find 64meg for next to nothing. If it's less than a pentium, then find a free pentium in a dump somewhere, or pay $20 for a P2...

Otherwise just use CLI...

And get a recent version of slack or debian. It would probably run better...

Will more recent versions of Debian run on a simple pentium? It's a laptop, so upgrading the cpu is probably non-trivial. Memory as well.. It's an IBM thinkpad 385CD. Memory might be cheap, but I am broke.. :^(

I may just stick with twm, unless someone thinks olwm might be slimmer or perhaps fluxbox. (I think olwm looks 'cool', but then I think AMC pacers look 'cool' too)

Laptop. Stick to CLI or TWM at best... I'm pretty broke too, but find lots of free stuff.

As for distro, you could install a current slack I'm sure...

TWM?!?!?! you must be joking ....

i would recommend a more modern choice, one thats more, erm, usable? FVWM is based on TWM, has a module system for extensions, quite customizable (config file), and is fairly light, nothing all that fancy tho, but better the TWM i think. You could also use WM's like Ion (frame based, keyboard friendly, i havent used it since they switched to a new customization system that uses Lua), i know im forgetting another keyboard friendly modern and light WM ... owell.

As for desktops, DFB is the best choice, only because it has GTK1 ported to use it, as well as mplayer, and a few other untils. All the other light GUI's are not popular, not completed, and diffidently have no support from developers. I would recommend sticking with X unless you really do need the extra CPU and memory, personally just switching what programs you use could make a big difference (no KDE/GNOME, possibly look at fltk (tho, i cant find i good (like emelfm) file manager for it, but a web browser is supposed to be getting ported to it (dillo), tho, its been said to be doing that for some time, so i dono). Really see if you can find alternate programs first, as a GUI is a big switch, one that requires developers to support, and right now, only DFB has any real support as a alternate GUI to X.