Have you seen the Windows glass effect on windows 7? Is it similar to Aero? If you've seen and used it, what is your opinion of it-is it useful or just an annoying, memory eating waste?

I'd be interested in the reply to this as I'm considering a new PC and it's bound to ship with W7. I'd also like to know if it's something you can turn off and on yourself.

Yes you can turn it off, and that is in fact recommended if your graphics card isn't quite good enough to support the effect. I've not had a problem as my machine is good.

Like with most visual effects, it's mainly just eye candy when it comes down to it but since I have plenty of RAM and a decent video card, I don't need to disable it.

Back in my Vista days on one of my other computers on the other hand, I had to disable all the "cool" effects as I only had 1GB of RAM and had to make the most of it. If you're unfortunate enough to have this issue in Win 7, just disable it. It's better to have stable performance over unstable eye candy.