I upgraded to Gnome 2.2 on Slackware 9, and have found MetaCity to
unhelpful because of its minimization animation.  AFAIK, it cannot be
turned off; this implies it is a bug (any undesired behaviour which cannot
be disabled).

I have a large Xinerama desktop, and often have several windows open at
once.  I like to have vidoes going on one of them while I work.  Having the
minmization animation randomly scribble over all my windows (since I have 2
instances of the taskbar, one on each monitor, it will pick left or right
based on solar flare activity) causes much annoyance -- especially when it
scribbles over the media window.

The moment I do alt+space+n or hit minimize, my attention is elsewhere. 
Please add a control to remove this.