I still use the gadgets on my Windows 7 systems for both 32 and 64 bit which are fully patched and here is the list of ones I use with no problems:
Clock - selected from the Windows 7 gadgets selection built into Win 7 and I check the box to show the red second hand.
CPU Monitor - This one is not from the built in Windows 7 gadgets selection, but I got it from a trusted source.
Network Monitor - Just like the CPU Monitor not part of Win 7 selection and got from same trusted source 3 or 4 years ago.
Weather - Selected from Windows 7 gadgets selection built into Win 7, just had to enter my zip code for it to know location.
All 4 of these work flawlessly on 4 systems that they are on.
*Note: The security risk in gadgets is mainly if you have a dirty gadget installed from a 3rd party. It is not a risk if you have clean gadgets. I feel that the reaction to stop using all of them immediately was going overboard, and was also a driving force to try to force people to go to Windows 8.x if they want these features back. If it was as big of a problem as it was hyped out to be, there would have been an immediate patch to shut off the gadgets feature forced down to us from Microsoft. All they did was cause a stir and drop their hosting of the gadget downloads and on the same page that says sorry we no longer host these gadgets promote Windows 8 to try to push people to 8 who really dont need Windows 8.
I would suggest removing the gadgets from desktop. Then reboot, and then add them back and see if this fixes the problem. If it doesnt and you really want them to work, then there might be something corrupt in your system that is causing this and using Windows 7 repair disc to repair the build may be a solution or otherwise a clean installation of 7.
Like I said, I am using those gadgets and they are flawlessly working on 4 builds that are fully patched, so MS didnt as of yet kill the gadget service for Windows 7.
BTW: The CPU Monitor I use is great because it shows a graph of the active cores as well as memory use within that graph, so I can look at it and see a light blue line showing % of memory in use, and yellow and green line for the dual-core CPU to see how the CPU has functioned over the last 30 seconds on the graph. In addition to this it shows core actvity in bars with % as well as shows CPU details and core frequency, so I can see when it throttles back or runs at full speed.
The Network monitor has useful into such as Your IP, IP issued from ISP, upload and download speeds, graph showing network traffic of system among available bandwidth, and also shows how much data has been uploaded or downloaded with option to reset to 0 and clear the data or refesh the data.
*This Network Monitor was useful in detecting that a free game was attempting to use my system as a bit-torrent share among other gamers, but it was flooding my network connection with others needing game updates etc and this was affecting my internet speed with this uncontrolled upload flood and with an upload speed that is 1/5 the download speed this caused issues surfing the web and watching netflix etc because this games torrent was not designed to be courteous among other network needy services that also needed to share bandwidth on the upload pipe side, so I was able to kill off the sharing of this unwanted torrent to where I can get updates from others, but I am NOT willing to share with others the game updates and slow down my internet connection in the process.
In addition to this, this Network gadget also brought to my attention to a malware infection on my wifes system where she clicked on something on facebook and the antivirus didnt detect a problem, and there was unusual traffic to strange IP's. Doing and IP lookup I found that there was some identity in Venezuela connecting with this system when I fired up Wireshark to watch the traffic on my LAN between my wifes system and outbound. I ended up rebuilding her system clean and not messing around about what looked like a keylogger that was not sending the keys in real time, but sending them in timed interval bursts. She had MSSE installed and it didnt catch it. Malwarebytes when run detected all sorts of issues. I have also since then limited her privileges to user vs admin and this has avoided some issues as for she will state, it needs a password to do something and I ask what are you doing and she is like oh I am on a coupons website and the system chimed and popped up asking for the system admin password. I then say, we are not entering the system admin password to run whatever unknown script/installer wants to run as admin to install problems. And I am the only one who knows this system admin password, so i can control what is installed. LOL
Plain and simple... Gadgets to many are still important features to have! Just run the ones that are known to be clean if you do, and dont take chances downloading 3rd party ones that can be dirty!
