Dear Bongo,
Thank you for the list of tools out there. I tried all of them. In addition, Desktop from Sysinternal (i.e. Microsoft) as well but they don't work in the same way compiz does. Here is the reasoning:
Under Ubuntu with Compiz, you can run a full screen 3D application (say: opengl) and without minimizing the app, you can rotate the screen to a different virtual desktop that is mutually exclusive from the first one. The game continues to run.
Under Windows with any of the Virtual Desktop tools, switching the workspace creates a dummy view of the workspace. The workspaces are not separate instances but the same instance with icons reshuffled around. However, in affect this is not an elegant solution because if you run a full screen 3D app on one virtual desktop, switching to another minimizes the game or causes instability (perhaps deadlock in mutex).
Often times I am running a full 3D application and would like switch workspace and start another full screen 3D application and be able to switch between the two. None of the solutions proposed so far nor the sysinternal's Desktop app seem to properly resolve this issue. Seems like a Windows UI limitation at the OS level ?
Thank you.