Mint 13 with XFCE, pretty darn nice

I'm a long time Ubuntu fan, but 12.04 had me concerned.  I just don't like the new UI.  I'm sure its great for a thousand reasons, but I don't like it.  I'm still on 10.04 with XFCE and Compiz effects.  It was my dream UI, customized the way I like it.  But now 10.04 is getting retired and I need to move on.  Since Ubuntu 12.04 no longer looked like a great option with the defaults, I have started to try some other installs.  I installed 12.04 standard which had some issues right away.  They seem to be going away with updates, but I'm not totally ready to make the switch.  Several times I was forced to stop working and send in crash reports.
I swapped out unity and tried enlightenment, which I have always liked the idea of, but just can't commit to.  The project is always interesting to me, with the right goals and ideas, but somehow, I just can't make it work for the way I want to work.  Then I tried Cinnamon, which has some real promise.  I'm not sure what I quite didn't like about it, other than it just didn't feel like home.  I might get used to it.  I was looking for a little more Compiz out of it.  Some easier ways to switch desktops and some cool effects.  I also wanted my standard right click get all my applications and I haven't quite found that yet.  I also don't have a doc with it, to replace my old conky dock.  I setup a floating panel, but its sort of a nuisance.  Concky floats out of the way when I'm trying to use the space and is generally pretty nice.  I'll keep that install as a dual boot option for a while to see if I like it.  I also tried XFCE on Ubuntu 12.04.  It was just fine.  I think I could play with getting some sort of Compiz features installed and make it fun, and it could work.  The problem was really the 12.04 crashes.  I haven't figured out the root cause of that so I decided to try something new.
I booted Mint 13 with XFCE RC on old computer, where I am typing this now.  The process was really painless.  I also installed it as a VM on my mac with 2gb of ram.  That install went easily as well. I can't say I have to many hours of use in with yet, but no crashes.  That seems odd since its based on Ubuntu 12.04, so I expected the same issues.  The odd thing too is that XFCE 4 looks so different to me from my version on Ubuntu 10.04, that I have a hard time recognizing it.  It has my trusty right click applications menu and the XFCE settings manager.  Its running quite fast as well considering I'm trying this on an Intel Pentium M with 500meg of ram laptop.  Go lenovo, Thinkpad.  This thing should be buried by now, but its very usable so far.  We will see how it goes, but it looks pretty darn good so far.