Windows 7 Gadgets Stop Working

Earlier today I was installing some software on my machine, listening to XM Radio through a desktop gadget as I often do, when the music stopped.  I didn’t think much about it, since at times my music streams can be bandwidth challenged.  Well, after the install I went back out to my desktop and saw that all of my gadgets were gone.

I checked task manager, and sidebar.exe was not running.  Aha, there’s the problem. I fired up C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\sidebar.exe. A little disk activity and sidebar.exe process lit up in Task Manager, then just as quickly disappeared.  A peek into event viewer game me this:

Faulting application name: sidebar.exe, version: 6.1.7100.0, time stamp: 0x49ee9780
Faulting module name: kernel32.dll, version: 6.1.7100.0, time stamp: 0x49eeaac7
Exception code: 0xc0000005
Fault offset: 0x0000000000003892
Faulting process id: 0x13b4
Faulting application start time: 0x01c9f11eac6dc107
Faulting application path: C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\sidebar.exe
Faulting module path: C:\Windows\system32\kernel32.dll

What does that mean?!?!?! A quick Bing search did not really provide much insight, except that many people had this problem with UAC being turned off.  Not so much the case here.  Coincidentally, one of the reports I saw was written about the same time my problem first started today.  UAC checked out, reboots did not fix the problem, but this person was having the very same issue.

I can’t imagine it was the software being installed….just not feasible.  Freaky, if that was the case. I quickly turned focus to Windows Updates and using System Restore, I rolled back to a point prior to yesterday’s critical update.  After the reboot, my gadgets were back and everything is working perfect again.  I don’t know if there was something specific about the update that occurred, but the gadgets were there and working earlier in the day.