Crunchbang isn't great. It breaks regularly; it's pretty big; and there are weird dependency problems. Compare it to distributions like Slitaz or Tiny Core, both of which really are small.

What I've done is to install Debian (you can choose testing or stable) base system. And Fluxbox / Openbox on the top of it will all the applications you need. I'm happy with that.

thanks for mention them, i'm going to try both of them :D