You could try xfce4 or fluxbox (although fluxbox is slightly more non-intuitive for a novice).
You might well need to cut down quite agressivly on unneeded daemons/X programs, but I reckon its possible. My xfce4 desktop starts up while using about ~86mb of volitile memory, and I've never bothered to really slim that down by much (I have 2gb of ram, so I don't consider it a priority atm). -- www.gnu.org
