No, I'll get conky set up later.
It's always been pitched as a low resource window manager; however, up until recently it has always been unstable. I would get seg faults on a regular basis with the 0.16 versions. Lowrider at #! claims the 0.17 (first stable release) versions are good so I'm taking a look.
I've always liked it since it is very similar to fvwm (the original enlightenment project was derived/forked from fvwm, I believe).
Besides the instability, the lack of themes (they were all glassy so little variety) and the difficulty of creating your own theme have really held it back. IMO Xfce (another fvwm derivative, I think) has really surpassed it in any functional and aesthetic sense without hogging the resources.
edit - add conky to startup apps:
e17 uses it's compositor by default; conky made transparent with argb settings.
