Aero Glass is a free tool that enables the frosted glass effect in Windows 8 and 10

[harlan4096]

Aero Glass is a free program that, well you guessed it, restores the popular"Aero Glass-effect" in Windows 8 and Windows 10. The program uses Windows' built-in Desktop Window Manager to produce the effect.

So, let's see how it works. There are two options that are available during the installation: Windows 10 Acrylic Design and Windows 8 RP Aero Glass Design. You can also enable the "Protect Aero Glass by adjusting access permissions" option.

Once you have installed the program, you will see that application title bars will become semi-transparent with the frosted glass effect. In case they don't, open the Task Manager, right-click on Explorer and select restart. You may want to restart some programs if they don't have the Aero Glass effect. Here's what the window looks like normally.

And here's the one with the effect enabled.

Note: The program displayed a pop-up message which says that this is the free version of Aero Glass, and also shows a machine code. I didn't find any use for this, but I'm guessing it may be required as part of the activation process for the donation license. The program seems to place a watermark on the wallpaper. Apparently, that's what the donation removes.

Getting it to work

You may get an error which says "Aero Glass for Win8.1+ Incompatibility issue - Aero Glass does not know how to hook your version of DWM (0x2010)". This isn't an actual error, if you'd read the last screen of the installation wizard, you'll know why this issue occurred. The program requires some extra files (DWM symbols) which aren't downloaded by default (unless you have a donation key).

As a workaround, you'll need to get the symbols yourself. You can do so from Microsoft's website. The files you'll need are for the dwmcore.dll and udwm.dll. Or you could do what I did, and use the open source PDB Downloader program. Props to SuperUser forums for the perfect solution.
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