Classic Shell for me, although I have only installed the Classic Start Menu. But now I find myself not using it. Which is weird because I recall how I pissed and moaned about it not being there. Could Microsoft be right about removing it? Is there a link where I can monitor parka sales in Hell?
I personally find most of those start-buttons (+ menu's) beautiful, although I personally prefer Windows 8 the way it is, adding a start-button that would bring the user back to the start-screen is something I would like to see in Windows 8.1 (Blue), thus letting people know that the start-menu hasn't ''died'', but that it has evolved into the start-screen, + it would be touch friendlier for people to push a little round orb, than to bring your finger to the lower-left-side of the screen and click it (I personally think it would be more confusing on touch-devices than on my Traditional-P.C.).
After using so many start menus .. i finally picked one that's easy to use and lowest on resources.. StartisBack gets my vote.. I want to try Start Menu Reviver though, the design is amazing. (though not sure on the resource usage...)
After try several and all had some gliches, I didn't use any Start Menu an d even didn't miss it any more! Snow from yesterday! Life going on without start Menu! Viola!
My problem is that I am unwilling to pay for such a basic feature, and all the alternatives I've used have snags. ViStart hangs up a lot and can't handle higher DPI settings. ClassicShell uses "Recently used programs" instead of the more useful "Frequently used programs." And StartMenu8 is just extremely slow to load the first time you click on it--as if it doesn't cache the menus in memory upon startup. And while I guess I could look for more freeware solutions in the list above, I've gotten used to not needing it. Sure, I'd prefer to still have "Frequently used programs" (Microsoft is an idiot to have removed that), but that's only one feature to be missing. You can always right click on the Start tile to get all the right-hand options, and even a few more. And the actual Programs menu is useless unless you take the time to manually organize it. (It should have been automatically organized, like on many Linux distros.) I mean, I even successfully weaned my dad off the Start Menu. He now knows to click either the games icon I made him and pinned to the taskbar or to click the folder icon to get to My Computer.
Newest version of Classic shell kinda pushes the new start button off to the side. If you put the cursor over the lower left corner the MS button will popup and overlap classic shell and provide all the power user options of you right click or switch to the start screen with a left click. Works nice but MS made them pull the metro looking button.