I tried Vector Linux over the weekend. It's not the easiest install, but it's very reliable (unlike the PCLinuxOS install which looks nice and is easy, but has a very unreliable partitioning stage) from this end and gave me a very nice desktop. Once it's installed, you'll want to change the theme which is hideous, and turn off all the annoying window manager sounds, but from here on out, you're very solid.
Gslapt looks just like Synaptic and works very well, connecting to Vector's own hosted repositories for easy package management. The system is lightning fast and feels like a very distilled, sober KDE. I can imagine using this system for a long time, except that it lacks the "flavor" that I love so much from a distro (i.e. the thing that keeps me coming back to Zenwalk, using dyne:bolic, etc.).
Anyway, I highly recommend this! It's actually more usable than Zenwalk at this stage, and if they just simplified the install process and added a graphical installer, it would shoot up the DW rankings. I think this distro has huge potential, as does Zenwalk. It seems that Vector has already worked out many kinks that Zenwalk's dealing with right now, but Zenwalk has superior design, a great customized Xfce, and a small warchest of custom configuration apps that give it an edge of its own.