Disabling More Aero Animations And "X" Button "glow"?

While there are a (small) handful of features of Aero that i'd like to use, there are many more that slow down the UI and/or make it distracting that I can't find a way to disable.(I even tried the "Basic" theme but it has a bug that discards font size settings made under the now-misnamed "color" dialog).So I end up in Windows Classic, which is being made more difficult to use, including the aforementioned "color" dialog.I've already been to the "Performance" settings and un-checked every animation available, but even after doing so two things remain:

1 The "glow" around control buttons. To me this is hideous and distracting.

2) Some animations still remain, slowing down the user interface.

To be clear, here's what I might like to use in Aero:

1) taskbar window previews

2) the program switching mechanisms (Flip or ALT+TAB)

3) maybe transparency would look okay, without the animations

Bottom line, Microsoft has bundled both good and bad features in this artificial "feature" called Aero, instead of making the features available individually, and made some of the Aero animations impossible to disable (as far as I know).