CandyBar is very nice and has a high degree of polish but its the kind of product you use maybe a couple of times a year to set things up once and then forget it. (ie up until Apple regains its sanity and uses an icon collection that is designed by someone with a modicum of aesthetics and design skills. It still stuns me that they shipped Leopard icons which are so badly designed, so flat, so lifeless, and convey such little information... In the words of John Siracusa Apple's gone and made it worse in a way that's obvious in seconds to anyone who's ever given any thought to interface design. It boggles the mind.)

So its pretty clear one needs a product to do the same thing as candy bar. But as many people have noted the price of candy bar seems somewhat excessive. Its a very nice product but its utility is compared to say a text editor, or maybe omni-outliner, etc. Anyway maybe I missed it, but no one seems to have commented below that there is a donation ware alternative LiteIcon. I have nothing to do with the product, I just stumbled across it one day. It seems to do about the same thing as CandyBar.