Total Commander is, hands down, the best file manager out there. Nothing really comes close in terms of speed and customization.

Quite honestly, it's a big part of the reason I still keep a Windows station at work (along with an MBP and an Ubuntu box).

Bah. That's a kid's toy compared to holy grail of file managers - the http://www.farmanager.com

Indeed.

Far Manager, Ctrl+O full screen switching, and having all shell commands (cmd.exe that is) for you is just amazing.

Searching, Sorting, Renaming, Editing, browsing .ZIP files, and even .EXE resources, like a proper tool would do it (nm that is).

FAR is amazing!

And his older brethren midnight commander is doing pretty good too (I'm also an OSX, Linux user)...

More power to such tools!

wouldn't that be Total Commander?

I chose xplorer2 over Directory Opus for one reason. Opus, like the built in Explorer, always groups files and directories in it's list. For example, in Explorer, if I sort a large folder by "Date Modified", the files are shown first, then the directories.

Xplorer2 does "the right thing" and interlaces them.