Easy Way To Repair A Crashed Windows Vista Sidebar

Posted by ilan

November 6, 2008

Windows vista sidebar is a very useful feature and also looks very nice on your desktop. It also can fill the empty space on the desktop especially when you are using a widescreen LCD monitor. However when you have placed too many widgets on the vista’s sidebar, it become unstable, crashed and eventually just hanged still. This article will show you how to solve the crashed windows vista sidebar with a very simple tweak

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.

Windows vista sidebar is very nice looking and it can fill and empty space in your LCD screen especially when you have a widescreen LCD monitor. But when you have placed too many widget on the windows vista sidebar it can bring you annoying error. The vista’s sidebar may become unstable, crashed and it just hanged. Here is an easy way to repair a crashed windows vista sidebar with a very simple tweak.

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: