The strange thing is you can get Aero by doing the following:
In the case of this particular issue both of these methods will not solve the problem and simply report that ‘ DWM not running‘ or ‘ Desktop Window Manager is disabled‘ and the system will still not enable Aero. There are two main tools that people turn to when troubleshooting Aero: So here is a post describing the sort of symptoms you might see and how to workaround it. I saw this numerous times in early workshops and pilots for customers and completely forgot about it until I saw the question asked again a few weeks ago.
An issue I saw a number of times at customers was that the Windows 7 Aero theme was not enabled after deployment.