Instead of disabling Aero, I just installed a custom theme and turned off all the transparency. I too found Aero to be too much of visual distraction; too many different colored elements with no consistency.
However, a subtle Aero theme is a considerable improvement of classic.
Select manage best performance (ie remove all the features) then turn back on the bottom 4 options. It gives you almost all the aero look but without the CPU/memory load
Unless you are running CUDA or openGL shader code, then anything that uses a GPU function brings you to a halt.
It took us a long time to work out why we getting crappy performance on some people's machines when the dev's with identical hardware were doing fine. Aero transparency does terrible things to the texture memory
However, a subtle Aero theme is a considerable improvement of classic.