Sadly, MS has dropped the Active Desktop in Vista just when it was catching on. What I'd pay a bounty for would be a small app that replicates the ability to show 'active' content on my Vista desktop.

I've seen some free/shareware programs that aim to do the AD thing, among other features, but I've yet to be able to do it painlessly.

What I'm looking for in specific is the ability to view web pages on my desktop (for looping weather .gifs/.jpgs). This app should allow for the customization of the pages, i.e., resizing and moving to different locations on my desktop.

Feel free to ask any additional questions,

Scott

Here is a picture of AD in XP:

http://img451.imageshack.us/im.....topzl7.jpg

This isn't perfect, but it is close to what you want. There's a Vista gadget called "Eye on the Web" that allows you to encapsulate any web page (or snippet of) on the sidebar or desktop. Here's the site:

http://tinyurl.com/2obd9b

I've posted an official bounty for this.. $103.24 for completion of this item. You can read more of the details here:
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto.....for-vista/

I'm really hoping that some brilliant coder feels like working on this!

The PNG idea is a truly great one, since you could do all rendering off-screen and then do nothing more than update the background image.

The only problem with it would be that the desktop wouldn't be live from a clickable standpoint, so if you wanted to render a news site, for instance, it wouldn't be linkable.

But the PNG idea would be useful from a separate standpoint, and would be a very cool utility that I'd like to see as well... I might even use it.

What about resizing/moving them around? Would you care if that was done in the settings instead of "live" ?

Yeah, I guess what I was thinking is that you could resize / move / arrange them in the settings, but not actually click on them on the desktop and resize them.

And yeah, by "live" I mean that you can move/resize them right on the desktop itself.

It would definitely make things simpler if they weren't resizable directly on the desktop.

So all we need is an application that runs in the system tray, has a settings screen to configure all the items on the desktop, and then it renders it to a PNG file for the desktop every few minutes.

Actually sounds kinda simple... now we just need a coder!

This bounty has been claimed by Andreas:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto.....for-vista/

AveDesktopSites does not have to get installed: unzipping it (all files!) should be good enough.

Are you using 64-bit vista? I wonder if that's the issue...