Aero is not needed for windows management… Seems that cubase is the only application that needs it to do things everybody else is doing since the last millennium…
I still stand by “hasty workaround” instead of “elegant fix” (which im still rooting for) - maybe something as simple as a visual container to put it all in…
I feel a windows 8 aura in this feature of cubase 8 “ahem”
(All the other things are nice tho;)
P.s. windows looks and works better with the non-aero themes;)
well… if you turn aero on, start cubase, then turn it off… it will work, at least in the rudimentary way of ‘work’, i don’t have time to really explore now. if it really is an arbitrary requirement then maybe someone can write a startup hack so it thinks it is on.
Steiny maybe? “Hope”
Just tried this and it crashed cubase…
heh, funny that it worked on mine.
Lol, indeed…
Gonna try it again… Fool me twice eh?
Edit: nope. Ah well… Hello aero… For now…
Well I take back what I said as I am up and runinng now and the transparent bars are a total annnoyance
agreed its not a perfect solution, but looking into the new C8 windows thing…
It looks like Cubase 8 is using the DWM APIs to do hardware accelerated compositing (based on the error message with the classic theme), and since it looks like DWM gets disabled when Aero is disabled, basically I’d guess not going to happen.
That said, hardware acceleration is a great thing, so abandoning a legacy theme is the only real option going forward. The classic theme was way too new for me anyway, OS/2 was where it was at!
Pim,
you might want to move to Win 8.1, it has the ability to do WDM in software (!) mode, so you could at least install C8, and if the machine is fast enough, it will work anyway, right?
Just an idea. And W8.1 is really not bad at all… 
Benji
Same here… 
I am sorry to hear that! However, the system requirements list “Graphics card with DirectX 10”. These cards are automatically Aero compatible so there is not much we can offer here except from suggesting a more recent graphics card.
I have also some issues with Cubase 8 Pro and Aero. In Cubase some fonts look “pixled” and the transport bar is sometimes split into pieces, on part moving outside the track window, kind of “funny”.
I have a rather old VGA card, AMD Radeon 2600 Pro, 512 MB RAM, which is anyway not rated to be capable for Aero by Windows…
My problem is solved and Cubase 8 starts! 
I bought a new video card but unfortunately my 60 euro’s were wasted. That didn’t do the trick. In my case I had to turn on The Desktop Window Manager Session Manager in ‘Services’.
Problem solved.
Maybe you should change the requirements to : Aero
My gfx card is fast enough, but i still use the classic theme…
Still hoping that you guys can fix that… Cant be that audio software is dependent on windows bloatware…
The bottom line is that it sounds like perhaps you switched to Aero and THEN tried to tweak it to make it look more ‘Classic’… and it won’t work. You’re stuck with all the crap you (and I) dislike.
“Aero” is mentioned in the requirements online. For the time being, there won’t be any change. And it wouldn’t be a fix as it is not a bug
I’m afraid I have to agree with the Aero haters here: I always use Classic on my studio systems, because Aero makes fonts look crap.
Happy to use a compromise of Aero with some hacks, once somebody figures out how, but plain Aero is a step backwards visually. Slightly regretting my C8 upgrade and will most likely continue with Nuendo 6.5 until this gets sorted out.
Jules
Sweet, so there is hope…
Other than that, sweet, thx:)
I hate aero. Every serious music maker use the classic theme. Please don’t force us to use it!
Having desktop composition enabled was already recommended for Cubase 7 on Win 7, as the performance decreased with the classic theme. With a little tweaking, you can get Windows 7 to have solid colours and look more “basic” and benefit from better performance.