{"id":75,"date":"2015-03-04T21:09:14","date_gmt":"2015-03-04T21:09:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.local\/?p=75"},"modified":"2015-03-06T01:00:45","modified_gmt":"2015-03-06T01:00:45","slug":"problems-with-windows-gadgets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.c-devtech.net\/?p=75","title":{"rendered":"Problems with Windows Gadgets"},"content":{"rendered":"

First, I would like to state that I know Microsoft<\/a> has said gadgets are a bad idea and that there are better alternatives out there. But I do development under Windows 7 and there are a few gadgets that I use everyday and like. For example, the weather gadget and the analog clock with the second hand.<\/p>\n

So that being said, it seemed that every couple of days the gadgets wouldn’t start. Initially I tried to fix it with a Reset_Gadgets batch file as presented by Shawn Brink<\/a>. This worked fine but I wanted to automate the fix so I checked what actually was needed. After some experimentation, it seemed that only killing and restarting the sidebar.exe application was necessary for the gadgets to reappear.<\/p>\n

Looking around I found a post by garycase<\/a> which mentions the problem as being the system booting ‘too fast’ and provides a ‘GadgetsFix.cmd’ to solve the problem. After removing the gadget’s auto-start registry key:<\/p>\n

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\\Software\\Microsoft\\Windows\\CurrentVersion\\Run] “Sidebar”=”C:\\\\Program Files\\\\Windows Sidebar\\\\sidebar.exe \/autoRun”<\/em><\/p>\n

I put ‘GadgetsFix.cmd’ in the start-up folder C:\\Users\\xxx\\AppData\\Roaming\\Microsoft\\Windows\\Start Menu\\Programs\\Startup<\/em> and while there was the occasional blinking of the gadgets on start-up they always seemed to appear. However, now I would get a Service not available<\/em> error from the weather gadget every few days.<\/p>\n

According to Aaron – G<\/a>, the problem was fixed by deleting the settings.ini <\/em>file or by doing just about everything Shawn Brink<\/a> was doing in his batch file. So while going back to the Reset_Gadgets batch file was certainly an option, I looked more into the settings.ini<\/em> angle and what I found was that if the config.xml<\/em> file was saved without making any changes<\/a>, the gadget services could connect again. Well, this sounded like the config.xml <\/em>just needed to be ‘touched’ for it to work so I found a little dos command that performs a ‘touch’<\/p>\n

COPY \/B %1+,, %1<\/em><\/p>\n

and put it into a batch file. I then edited the batch file ‘GadgetsFix.cmd’ by garycase<\/a> to include the touch.cmd file and everything seems to work pretty consistently. Here is my edited ‘GadgetsFix.cmd’<\/p>\n

@echo off
\ntimeout 2
\ntasklist \/FI “IMAGENAME eq sidebar.exe” 2>NUL | find \/I \/N “sidebar.exe”>NUL
\nIF “%ERRORLEVEL%”==”0” (
\ntaskkill \/f \/im:sidebar.exe
\n) else (
\ncall touch “C:\\Users\\xxx\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Windows Live\\Services\\Cache\\Config.xml”
\nstart “” “%ProgramFiles%\\Windows Sidebar\\sidebar.exe”
\n)<\/p>\n

timeout 1
\ntasklist \/FI “IMAGENAME eq sidebar.exe” 2>NUL | find \/I \/N “sidebar.exe”>NUL
\nIF “%ERRORLEVEL%”==”0” (
\ntaskkill \/f \/im:sidebar.exe
\n)
\nelse (
\ncall touch “C:\\Users\\xxx\\AppData\\Local\\Microsoft\\Windows Live\\Services\\Cache\\Config.xml”
\nstart “” “%ProgramFiles%\\Windows Sidebar\\sidebar.exe”
\n)<\/p>\n

exit<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

First, I would like to state that I know Microsoft has said gadgets are a bad idea and that there are better alternatives out there. But I do development under Windows 7 and there are a few gadgets that I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-windows-7-development"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1IEK3-1d","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.c-devtech.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.c-devtech.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.c-devtech.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.c-devtech.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.c-devtech.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=75"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.c-devtech.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":111,"href":"https:\/\/blog.c-devtech.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/75\/revisions\/111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.c-devtech.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=75"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.c-devtech.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=75"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.c-devtech.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=75"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}