I never used Aero when I had Vista installed. I found it too flashy and not "agile". I also had a problem due to the limitations of my graphic card, not having enough memory when plugging in my external monitor, which is a 22" LCD. Since Aero uses the graphic card memory, it has limitations. In any case I think the whole Aero thing is just for show. I've used a couple of taskswitchers during XP times and wasn't too fond of any. I also purchased the StarDock pack but to be honest, it messes up your system. At least it did for me everytime I installed it. I have everything working right now and don't want to install crapware.
Yesterday I found TaskSwitchXP. It's awesome. It's lightweight (1MB memory footprint), is not bloatware and has just enough functionality. On top of that, it actually works and it's fast to work with. It has a sticky mode where you can show the list of windows and switch. Obviously it doesn't have live windows support, i.e. video showing while switching, but then again, who cares, it's a useless feature anyway.