For longer than I care to count I've used the Alt-Tab Powertoy from MS to get a nicer view of running applications, alt-tab being one of those things that is hard wired into my brain at this point. It works, but occasionally it's flaky, doesn't want to change to a window unless you change to a different window first. For the last year or so I've switched to TaskSwitchXP, which does the same thing except better! One very nice feature is that you can alt-tab to bring up the app list, you get a preview window of the selected app, and you can actually just scroll/click to the app you need, you don't have to alt-tab 17 times to get there. This is for XP of course, if you're a Vista user you get similar functionality out of the box.

I haven't seen the first glitch and the price is still right; free!