Awhile back I was having framerate issues on my vista pc. Tried everything and nothing worked. I shut off Aero when I was setting up the machine thinking that, since aero is a resource hog, it would slow my framerates. In fact it was just the opposite, turning Aero back on increased my framerate by 40 fps. Just wanted to share that little counter-intuitive tidbit in case anybody else was thinking like I was.