I’ve been using Windows 7 for a while now and my test experience is nearly great, with some exceptions like for occasional NVidia driver crashing the kernel and a few restarts because of it. The other day, I found something new: my sidebar gadget was missing completely! After searching for it and googling, it turns out disable UAC altogether (setting to “Never Notify”) will make sidebar completely disappear and as soon as you bring it up only one notch (setting it to “Do not dim my desktop”) will automagically bring it back after a restart.

UAC

Luckily for me, guys on My Digital Life forum have a hack to get this going:

1- Close all gadgets.
2- Take the ownership of the Gadget folder and grant permission to Administrators (folder is located on Windows Drive:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar)
3- There are a couple of file here, create a backup copy.
4- Download the patched files here.
5- Overwrite the existing files with the ones in the zip file.
6- Re-add all your gadgets to your desktop.

This is a patch. It worked on my machine but use it at your own risk.