You don't have to turn off Aero, you just need to disable it on this specific application. I think it's under the Compatibility if you go into properties on the application/shortcut. It's on my list to see if I can't work around this at some point in the future, but initial efforts did not succeed and there's a lot of other more important stuff in the meantime -- so that's the workaround for now, and it shouldn't make much of any difference to AI War or the rest of windows when you do that...
