Newby: Gnome is nice, but it doesn't look like you put too much effort into yours.
nslay: Yea...I can't stand those boxes that spawn in that lower corning. Stupid WM.
The boxes that spawn in the lower corner...or "the clip", are the parent processes.
These boxes are differentiated by iconified windows in that they represent the
entire application. That said, if you double click a clipped box, it will bring to front, all non-iconified windows as well as the iconified boxes of the parent process.
Moreover, this allows for easy process killing...I can kill a process by right clicking the clipped box and selecting "Kill"
Oh, this also for hiding all windows of a parent process. If you right-click the minimize button on a window, it will cause all the windows of the parent process to minimize into the clipped box (Hence you will see a dot signifying that windows are hidden there). This is particularly useful if you want to eliminate some windows and iconified windows (boxes).
So that clip, or the boxes in the lower corner are very useful. But people generally don't see the value in these different features because its very common for window managers to have a Windows style layout, like KDE, Gnome and so forth. Window Maker is for lazy bums since its almost completely effortless to do anything, especially if you setup hover-to-focus.