Vista RC2, Aero Glass, and How to Get it Back

I’m still on build 5728, and, from the sound of the performance fubars in RC2, plan to stay there.  A quick hack that came across the MSFT newsgroups today was how to get Aero Glass BACK after upgrading.  Apparently RC2 locks down Glass to requring >1GB of RAM.  Stupid since it’s generated by the GPU and video card memory rather than the system memory.

Thanks to the m.p.windows.vista.general peeps for coming up with the registry settings:

• HKCU\Software\Microsoft\DWM\Composition — Set to 1 (32-bit DWORD value)
• HKCU\Software\Microsoft\DWM\CompositionPolicy — Set to 2 (32-bit DWORD value)

From here, you can either restart the box, or restart DWM by opening up an administrative command prompt (or services.msc console) and stopping and starting ‘uxsms’ (net stop uxsms  / net start uxsms).

I’m curious, while the Windows Experience Index regulates much of the … Windows experience, how much of that can be forced back on similar to the appearance settings in XP?  How annoying. 😦  I hope this is fixed in RTM and made into a configuration menu (or perhaps a TweakUI-esque application).