Vista Aero Glass doesn't work! ...

This also could have been titled my "Windows Flip (or "Windows Flip 3d") doesn't work!".

As a matter of fact, even my "Alt + Tab" switching between "live" thumbnails of windows wasn't working properly.

But then I found a fix.

I spent the better part of 2hrs today trying to figure out why all of a sudden my Aero Glass feature of Vista didn't work.

It worked earlier today, then all of a sudden not at all.  I could go to the "Appearance and Personalization" area of the Control Panel and every time I set the "Color Scheme" in "Appearance Settings" to Windows Aero it would flutter the screen and close the window (giving you the expectation it changed), only to find out that it defaulted back to the "Windows Vista Basic" setting.

After a lot of work I found the issue (for me anyway):

The issue was that earlier in the day I went to a web site that required a Java Runtime.  (I currently have J2SE Runtime Version 5.0 Build 6).  When I went there, the Java Runtime (or JRE) fired up.

I now know it was at that point that Vista's "Aero Glass" features stopped working (though I didn't see it at the time).

Though I could have upgraded the JRE I decided to disable/uninstall it ... voila ... Aero Glass is back in all it's glory.

In hindsight I Googled "java aero vista" and found a post that comes to the same conclusion.

This is about as "techy" as I get (and those who know me are wondering how in the world I could have fixed something like this for myself), but I thought I'd post it if it helps even one other person (or me if I run into this again).