How To Repair Your Crashed or Hanging Vista Sidebar
If you install a lot of different Vista Gadgets you might have come across a situation where your Vista Sidebar no longer is working correctly, or possibly even crashing or (more frequently) just hanging. You can reset the sidebar back to the default settings with a very simple tweak that we’ll explain here.
This tweak is as simple as backing up a file and then renaming it… and when the Sidebar starts back up again it will reset to the default settings.
Note: By resetting to the default settings, you’ll have to add your gadgets back to the sidebar. Hardly a problem if your sidebar doesn’t even work anymore.
Closing the Sidebar
You’ll want to make sure that the sidebar process is completely closed before you do anything else… and just because you don’t see the sidebar doesn’t mean it’s not running in the background.
First, right-click on the Sidebar icon in the system tray, and then choose Exit. (wallpaper found here)
You should receive a message asking if you really want to close, which you do.
Next you’ll want to check Task Manager to make sure that there are no sidebar.exe processes running that shouldn’t be. If there are, just right-click and use End Process on each of them.
Resetting the Sidebar to Defaults
Open up a windows explorer window and then paste the following into the location bar:
%localappdata%\microsoft\Windows Sidebar
This will open up the Sidebar gadgets folder, where you should see a file named Settings.ini.
You’ll want to rename this file to something else, or at least make a backup of the file elsewhere. This file contains your current sidebar configuration.
Now once you re-launch Sidebar from the Start Menu, you’ll notice that a new Settings.ini is created immediately.
If you are still having issues with a gadget, you can open up the Gadgets folder that you see above, and you’ll see a list of all user-installed gadgets:
You can delete any of these folders if you want (always backup your files first).
With any luck, you should now have a working sidebar.
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I had the same issue. The way I solved it was by running the command prompt as a true administrator and typing in these commands:
cd \Program Files\Windows Sidebar
regsvr32 -u sbdrop.dll
regsvr32 -u wlsrvc.dll
regsvr32 atl.dll
regsvr32 sbdrop.dll
regsvr32 wlsrvc.dll
Always wondered!
THanks!
I have a HP Pavilion Entertainment PC DV6000 Please I want to know if you have the answer to my question My laptop was working perfectly and I was doing a tattoo on a client and the screen went off and then I tried to turn it on again and nothing happend only the orange little lite that tells you if the wireless lite is working or not but the power button and the board doesn’t light up nor turn on and the screen is blank I only can see a black screen like when it is off not even the fan on the laptop turns on. Please tell if there is anything that I can do or if this is a bug that come3 with this type of computer I at first believed that it was on sleep mode or hibernate mode on its own. please someone send me a email.
thanks it worked!
had to reset my gadgets how i wanted them but at least they are back!
Thanks! It was very easy way to repair my computer sidebar =)
Thank you so much for your help! I could not figure out for the life of me how to get my sidebar for vista to work. It was frozen and it messed everthing up when we tried to use the computer! We had to stop the process everytime we would start up the computer. I will always look to you all now if I have another vista problem. You are awesome!
Thanks both to the OP and to commenter Jason Ross for the excellent information. Unfortunately these measures don’t fix my particular crash, but these were useful things to try.
Hi, I hope to get some help here.
I use the Notes feature in Windows Sidebar and found it greatly convenient and useful.
However i realize that whenever i accidentally click on the “x” and close the gadget, this operation happens to delete all the stored data i have in notes as well. Re-adding the gadget seems to give me a completely blank notes.
This is highly frustrating and un-dependable. is there any way around it?
Thank you.
Thanks so much, I have been searching for days, and finally, I fixed my sidebar, I accidently left an autoclicker on my add gadget thingy, and so It made my sidebar unusable, thanks a lot!
Nice post, thanks! Followed your steps, didn’t solve my problem, but it cleaned the Setting file, which was a good thing. My problem was that the “Add Gadget” command did nothing, The gadgets window would not open. After two days of searching, I deleted all gadgets from the Gadets folder and realised that one of them was causing the problem. Now everything works!