So I found Backlight 2 to work well for me, and it's free as well. Get if from here:
http://freshsqueeze.com/products/freeware/
Backlight 2 allows us to put Goldfish Aquarium on the desktop as wallpaper. I get a respectable 67 fps on my 1600x1024 display displaying a lush tank with five fish.
So I set up backlight 2 and run GA as wallpaper routinely now. I setup the GA preferences to limit the frame rate to 20, which keeps CPU usage nice and low and does not beat up the graphics card so badly. Just on the main monitor.
I must be crazy, but GA is so engrossing. My hat is off to the person who developed the code that animates these fish.