I can comment on the 32 bit version of crunchbang"Waldorf" as I have it currently on one of my partitions.
The Crunchbang installer seems decent enough. It does give the option of encrypting the hard drive. Once configured, the installer seemed to finish quickly enough and I encountered no errors during the installion.
I chose a standard ext3 install to my sda2 partition with grub2 on root and chainloaded onto my legacy grub.
I found that my Intel mobile4 video was configured with GLX rendering correctly on installation. This is one thing I do have to fiddle with in antiX to get working properly.
The stock desktop looks pretty bleak but with some fresh imported wallpaper and some new conky colors you can make it look cheery.
In my opinion, CB has the best adaptation of Thunar I have found in any distro. Using Thunar, I was able to mount all my other partitions as well as my network shares.
A look at my fstab showed only the install and swap partitions were listed. How Thunar is able to find the other partitions on my hard drive I don't know.
My stock CB install used 110MB at idle. I installed ceni and got rid of network manager. I eliminated services such as bluetooth.
I stopped the clipboard manager, hotcorners, volumekeys daemon, and compositing and was able to get the memory at idle down to 64MB.
This is compared to my current antiX iceWM install with smbnetfs mounting my network shares using 56MB at idle.
I really don't like the sudo command and prefer su along with seperate root and user logins.
I found myself installing many of the apps and tools that are stock in antiX.
CB really has no equivelent to antixsnapshot,the newusb.sh script, or any of the other scripts or apps unique to antiX that I use. They pretty much leave it up to the user to build, borrow or adapt their own tools.
CB has a very friendly and helpful user forum, at least in my experience. Their wiki is a little outdated.
To summarize though, if antiX ceased to exist __{{emoticon}}__ , Crunchbang would be my distro of choice. I feel pretty comfortable with it and with some tweaking it can be made quite lean.

anticapitalista wrote: However, overall I was not too happy. Install took ages (compared to what I am used to) with error messages (though install did succeed - and I'm sure this will be sorted in the future) I couldn't access my partitions via Thunar (nor rox after I installed it as / etc/fstab was empty), once I set up a 'proper' root user, I could not get auto-completion to work and it seemed to kill some apps as well ie the slim setup app. RAM use was around 130MB (freshly installed antiX uses 60MB on this box).


Give it a try and let me know what you think and I hope my initial test was not what most of you think. (I still have it installed to hard drive, but I might wipe it for a DEbian 64 bit net-install).

After my good experience with Crunch 32 bit I decided to dig a little deeper and try the 64 bit version. I downloaded the newest 64 bit version that was released this week.
My experience running 64 bit Crunchbang LIVE DVD echoes my good experience with the 32 bit version.
Everything worked well, Thunar mounted my other partitions and my network shares.
I rebooted and installed. Everything went well in the installation until the very end when the installer kept asking for another CD with some additional information. I was able to finally bypass the error messages and installed grub to the root partition. Total time 14 minutes to install.
Upon reboot, I was able to log in but Thunar would not let me access the other partitions or network shares. Ram use was almost 150MB at idle and according to conky my swap partition was not active.
Further investigation showed my fstab was empty also.
So anti, my experience is pretty much the same as yours. __{{emoticon}}__
This is even more upsetting to me as I had just (based on my positive 32 bit experience) recommended the 64 bit version of CB to someone who has a new Lenovo' T430S with 16GB ram.
EDIT: After the failure to install 64 bit Crunchbang I downloaded the new 32 bit testing version and experienced the same errors with it.

Installed Crunchbang 32 on my oll' AMD Athlon 1500+ from USB. Install went smooth, without a hitch. Took about 20 minutes. As with Afab4 I am impressed with the setup of Thunar. Crunchbang is very responsive. I was not able to activate wiresless, but I couldn't do this either on AntiX. Maybe it has to do with the heavy encryption on the router (wpa2 + AES and TKIP). I like the looks of Crunchbang (reminds me of my first antiX 6.5 with the dark theme). Crunchbang however needs a manual in my opinion. I don't know how to handle some things regarding the menu.
As a Dutch user I can state that localisation in AntiX is much better (hè hè).