Gadgets not loading at all at boot

Dude! If your computer runs smooth, why do you ever need to know the CPU/RAM usages? Personally, running an Intel i7 and 8GB RAM so I don't care how much is taken, as I will never run out of any.

Just give up the gadgets and was your worries away. They will never be the way they were before, anyway! Good luck!

If you're still having this issue, there's a very simple fix.

First, the issue is that your system is booting "too fast"

The gadgets you've selected actually attempt to load before the sidebar.exe process has been started - so they don't get loaded in the sidebar. That's why a right-click => View => Show Desktop gadgets, repeated twice, will cause them to show okay. That just toggles off the desktop gadget display; then toggles it back on ... but when you do it this way sidebar loads first and all works just fine.

This is, of course, a PITA to do every time you boot ... but you don't have to.

Just create a small batch file that (a) toggles the gadget display; (b) waits one second; and (c) toggles the gadget display again. You can put a link to this on your desktop (or the file itself) ... and then when gadgets don't display a simple double-click of this icon will display them. Alternatively (this is what I did), you can start the batch file with a 2 second wait; and then just add a shortcut to it in your Startup folder. Then gadgets ALWAYS display. If they happen to display on boot, then when the script runs they will briefly disappear and then reappear; if they don't appear on boot they will in 3 seconds.

I usually just have the weather gadget as it is quite accurate and useful to have at a glance.

Been having this issue for a while little myself. Probably less than a year since I noticed it first occurring. Quite annoying to have to reboot my computer when it doesn't occasionally load at start up.

Thank you very much for the easier work around, garycase!

right-click => View => Show Desktop gadgets, repeated twice

Works like a charm and less hassles than rebooting.

As I noted, there's an even simpler fix that never requires you to do that. Copy the following text; save it in Notepad and call the file "GadgetsFix.cmd". Save that file somewhere (I put it in a "Utilities" folder in Program File). Now you have two choices:

(1) If you never want to have to bother with it, just put a shortcut to it in your Startup folder. Also, right-click the shortcut and set it to run minimized. Now your gadgets will ALWAYS load. Note that if they load correctly on bootup, they will briefly disappear ... then reappear. But they will always be there

(2) If you don't like the "disappear-then reappear" behavior on some boots; you can just put a shortcut to the file on your desktop instead of having it always run. Then whenever the gadgets don't appear, just double-click the shortcut.

Here's the code for the batch file:

@echo off
timeout 2
tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq sidebar.exe" 2>NUL | find /I /N "sidebar.exe">NUL
IF "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" (
taskkill /f /im:sidebar.exe
) else (
start "" "%ProgramFiles%\Windows Sidebar\sidebar.exe"
)

timeout 1
tasklist /FI "IMAGENAME eq sidebar.exe" 2>NUL | find /I /N "sidebar.exe">NUL
IF "%ERRORLEVEL%"=="0" (
taskkill /f /im:sidebar.exe
) else (
start "" "%ProgramFiles%\Windows Sidebar\sidebar.exe"
)

exit

Hey,

Thanks for taking the time to reply. Moved to Windows 8 a while back, so I'll just mark this as solved - might help others, though.

Good luck!

I need an analogue clock on my desktop and wish to monitor my CPU and RAM, and have tried all the 'usual workarounds' to keep the Gadget Platform loading correctly...

Therefore, you have my sincere gratitude for providing a long sought-after resolution, i.e. the batch file which instantly fixes the issue..!

Thank you garycase...

Here it is May 2014 and I just started having this gadget problem. It seems to have started after the KB2964358 update.

Thanks Garycase for providing a most convenient solution.

Oh, i've had this for a long time. Usually i'd reboot once and it'd be fixed in about 8 out of 10 boots. Only now i found out graycase's "right-click => View => Show Desktop gadgets" off/on worked too.
I use the clock and weather which i find quite handy.

I just want to tell that I have used lot of time to solve the Sidebar-problem. It is for sure that the hard drive type has influence of the Sidebar loading. When I had a conventional hard disk there was no problem at all.

Then I switched my boot drive to SSD and the troubles began. Some times Sidebar started OK, other times not, it was very random and unstable. I tried a lot but nothing would help.
I had to use the trick by stopping the sidebar process in Windows Task Manager with following manuel start.

Switching back and forth between HDD and SSD, I only had problems with the SSD (There could be other problems than Sidebar, especially when SSD was half filled, maybe RAM also have influence).

Righ now I have a Seagate hybrid drive SSHD, and Sidebar show up on my desktop so far.

Next time I am using my SSD, I will try the mentioned code for the batch-file.