In this Slashdot story covering John Dvorak’s notion that Linux is too much like Windows (yawn) was mention of Slicker, a replacement for KDE’s Kicker.
Coding hasn’t started yet, but there are several screen mockups of a proposed design. So far, I’m very much impressed, and I hope this project succeeds. (There’s also discussion of Slicker development in the Gentoo forums, so perhaps it has a chance after all.)