This via the Ubuntulite* mailing list, an unconventional Ubuntu setup on a 1Ghz VIA machine with only 128Mb of RAM.
http://www.linux.com/feature/128940?theme=print
Unconventional is probably not a fair adjective; by that I really only mean unconventional to me — I don’t ever bother with desktop icons or trays or volume control buttons. But it does reiterate that you can build an entire (pseudo-)desktop environment with other utilities, and end up with a full-featured, pretty and complete system that probably runs rather fast too.
I’ll reserve my own opinions on that setup, since I generally use something vaguely similar. It looks like Mirage, mplayer, ePDFView and a few others I recommend also won points in that “review.”
I did try Decibel after seeing it mentioned, and it seems like a nice little audio player. Personally I prefer AlsaPlayer for machines that don’t revolve around audio playback (like my Thinkpad or Inspiron, which are relegated to other tasks), or Audacious for machines that do. I think my main turnoff for Decibel was that the Arch version wanted to install dbus, which I happily avoid. (I mentally hook dbus, hal, fam, gamin and a crop of other daemonlets into a category called “somewhat undesirable although sometimes tolerated”).
Otherwise the system looks more or less like my own creations. Nice wallpaper too. 
*As best I can tell, it seems Ubuntulite is still operating, although in a state of quasi-dormancy. I believe the project leader might be approaching the end of a school term, and so things have quieted somewhat. I think it is now fully part of the RULE project, too.
I think Decibel is pulling dbus because of the plugins it has. Also, since you don’t like fam/gamin do you compile kernels without inotify in them?
As far as I understood gamin wasn’t really anymore overhead because of inotify in the kernel. I don’t personally use gamin/fam since I use Gnome. Just curious.
They’re not terrible, and I probably shouldn’t have even mentioned them. I just have a tendency to worry about programs that use them, since they start to rake in other things as well.
And yes, I disable both inotify and dnotify in my kernels. I can’t say it makes a huge difference, but yes, I take them out. I should try something gamin-based and put inotify back in again, I guess. …