Clutter Free is one of the most useful backend WordPress plugins I've seen in a while.  All it does is simplify the post-writing screen by taking away many of the options that are virtually never used, such as Post Status, Post Timestamp, Post Author, etc.  These things might be useful for some people, but I personally never even touch them unless I'm moving them out of my way.  Cleaning up the post-writing screen is something I toyed with in the past, but I found that it's quite difficult to modify core WordPress functionality without actually editing core WordPress files.  So I'll leave that up to the people who are paid to do it.  This plugin only technically works with WordPress 2.0.5 and above (which isn't out yet), but it does a few things to 2.0.4.  Good enough for now.