Right now I use fvwm, which I've used for many years in the past as well. It's very configurable and powerful, though you will need to read a bit and be prepared to write your own config file. It has all I need, and I can configure it to the bare minimum I need. I don't need desktop menus since I am a keyboard guy anyway, and I prefer key bindings. I use dmenu as my app launcher. I never understood why do people put icons on the desktop. The space in your screen should be used for it's for: running programs. I only see my background when I startx
I use bash for most my file administration tasks. When I need a file manager I use mc which is also very configurable. I also use mc as my burning frontend, with a custom menu I made (just ask for instructions if you are interested). I also use it to launch my videos in mplayer (plain mplayer, not gmplayer).
I use moc as my music player, it's text based, and the interface can be dettached once the playlist is set up and running. You can reattach with mocp -y to the daemon if you need to change something in the list, or if you want to completely exit mocp. It also supports streams and is configurable.
The only file management issue where bash and mc are inefficient for me is when dealing with dirs full of image files. For that I use gqview.
The bigger graphical app I use is firefox, which I also use as my mail reader. I download the mail to my server using fetchmail, sort it using procmail, and serve it using dovecot. I then use squirrelmail to access the dovecot imap server from firefox, by just pointing it to my home server.
I always try to reuse as much resources as I can, and I try not to waste power. The hardware is cheap enough these days, but in my opinion, wasting resources and power without a reason is a silly thing.
About automounting... I really never liked it. But I guess you could look into ivman, which can do it at daemon level and is not linked to any GUI.
