I know in Windows 7, if you used basic instead of aero it would disable dwm and compositing. Does Aerolite for 8.1 affect either dwm or compositing?
Nope, Aero Lite still uses DWM. The only way to disable it on Windows 8.x is to suspend the Winlogon.exe process and then kill DWM.
Is that supposed to mean "desktop composition and the Desktop Window Manager (DWM)," or something else.