I ran across this little application the other day called wbar. wbar is just another one of those fish-eye style application launchers, but the difference is that wbar uses only the base level X libraries for rendering itself which makes it very lightweight. It also keeps wbar from being geared toward any certain desktop environment. This lightness and desktop agnostic approach makes wbar a good choice for a desktop minimalist that wants a little bit of eye candy. I haven't found a pre-compiled package for wbar, but you can download the source from the link above and compile it pretty easily with the good ole' open source compile mantra

./configure
make
sudo make install

You can use the command "ldd" to see that the libraries that wbar depend on are very few and very lightweight.

ldd /usr/bin/wbar
	linux-gate.so.1 =>  (0xffffe000)
	libImlib2.so.1 => /usr/lib/libImlib2.so.1 (0xb7eaa000)
	libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6 (0xb7e40000)
	libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0xb7e2b000)
	libX11.so.6 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.6 (0xb7d3f000)
	libXext.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXext.so.6 (0xb7d31000)
	libdl.so.2 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libdl.so.2 (0xb7d2d000)
	libstdc++.so.6 => /usr/lib/libstdc++.so.6 (0xb7c48000)
	libm.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libm.so.6 (0xb7c23000)
	libgcc_s.so.1 => /lib/libgcc_s.so.1 (0xb7c17000)
	libc.so.6 => /lib/tls/i686/cmov/libc.so.6 (0xb7ae6000)
	libXau.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXau.so.6 (0xb7ae3000)
	libXdmcp.so.6 => /usr/lib/libXdmcp.so.6 (0xb7ade000)
	/lib/ld-linux.so.2 (0xb7f1a000)