Aston is great; though I've never seen them down, i'm constantly at their site/forums... I think you'd love it hehe; so many integration plugins too...
The only downside is that the program mappings don't exist (like click start, type regedit; won't work, instead i have to put the full path to it); other than that I've not had a problem making anything work properly.
I've not had any speeddown issues, in fact on my computers they're running MUCH faster than with the explorer shell.
I <3 aston long time...