Have always been an explorer fan, as I have tried other file browsers, but they haven't quite fit my taste.
Decided to see where things are now, and found Directory Opus to be pretty popular, so I gave it a shot.

Finally, something that I can say really does beat explorer.  It's got most things you'll need, and is customisable like hell.

However:
- It's not freeware
- Being more powerful, it does suck up more RAM than explorer
- It also takes longer to start up, but I presume the developers realised that, which is why it seems the application tries to get you to launch its quickloader on Windows startup (basically loads the program into memory, so when you open a folder, it's faster)

Some things I'd like:
- It'd be nice if the coloured path bars acted like the "Location" (address) bar in that you could type in there.  The coloured bars don't seem to have much use otherwise.
- I'd like a shortcut to copy the current directory's path, though this may be possible (it's got a fairly complex command system which drives its shortcut keys)
- It'd be cool to have a command-prompt window/pane, though I've set "Command-Prompt Here" to a shortcut, which works well enough I guess


So if you're looking for an explorer replacement, you might want to give this one a go.

Now I have to find a shell replacement, which will allow me to finally ditch explorer.exe altogether :P