You can have icons on the desktop in Unity, at least in 11.10. Not sure
about 11.04. Messy is okay if that is the way that you work. As for XP vs
W7, XP is dead like GNOME Classic. MS will stop support in 2014. GNOME will
not support GNOME 2.x. You can say that you will resist W7 and Unity, but
time will tell. New hardware will come with W7 and maybe W8 next year. Most
distros will ship new versions with either GNOME Shell or Unity. You do not
have to like it, but that is the reality. As for me, I use KDE and it is
sane, at least for the present.