I used to use litestep on XP. Bit by bit I got rid of all the unnecessary shell widgets until I was left with just a context menu that would pop up when I hit the meta (windows) key. That allowed me to do all my OS-ing by stepping down into nested menus, wither with the mouse or arrow keys. It was the best shell experience I've ever had.
Dock? ×
taskbar? ×
systray × (clock and some system info was on the context menu).
The file browser was Dopus, which does use the left to right form, so ✓