Well, I ended up uninstalling it outright a day before it expired (I've had WAY too many apps trash my PC & phone by expiring before I uninstalled them, and left me unable to easily undo one or more customizations they did along the way), and decided to give Winterface a try.
The verdict: not nearly as pretty as SPB Shell, but Winterface seems to work a lot more like the way I want it to work than SPB Shell did. Even after using SPB Shell for a week, I felt like I was endlessly fighting with it and constantly drilling down menus to do things that I wanted to be able to do with a single touch from the 'now' screen. The fact that SPB Shell refused to put an icon for Opera Mobile in the 'internet' folder was the final nail in its coffin. Winterface isn't perfect... but it comes the closest of anything I've tried so far
