You'll want to look into the
BBInterface plugin. There might be a more specialized plugin for what you want, but I am not sure.
If you want a quick launch bar, BBIconBox is the easiest way. You can also use this to simulate the "desktop," by creating a box linked to the desktop folder (or any arbitrary folder). If you want to make it bigger than 12 rows/columns, you have to edit the settings file for the plugin. For some reason the menu-based selection is limited to 12.
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Note that when I said instability issues with aston shell, it was the shell process itself crashing; it never took out Windows itself and could be restarted by the task manager.