One of the very few things I liked about Yahoo Widgets (formerly Konfabulator), and one of the only things, was that you could assign a hotkey to bring all of the widgets to the front. I use Harvest for time tracking, DU Meter for bandwidth monitoring (see my modified numeric-only DU Meter sidebar gadget) and the built-in weather gadget. I don't need – or want – to see all of these all the time, but I do like to be able to glance at them all at once, just like the Dashboard allows in OS X.
If you press and hold the Start menu key and then press the space bar (Start+Space) the sidebar and all gadgets will be brought to the front. This is the same as double clicking on the Sidebar tray icon 
. As far as I can tell there is no hotkey combination to hide the sidebar or send it to to the back of all windows.
I always like to know how much bandwidth I'm using – I'm a little weird. I've been a big fan of DU Meter for bandwidth monitoring on Windows (on OS X I highly recommend iStat menus) for a long time, but I don't like the distraction of moving graphs.
There are two bugs in the current release of DU Meter (4.0.3076) that really aggravate me. The first is position related; the window remembers it's last position, and doesn't check to see if that might be offscreen. If it remembered it's position relative to the nearest corner this wouldn't be an issue, instead if I go between my 15" laptop screen and a 30" LCD it's either right in the middle of the window or hidden. The second bug involves the display of the numeric graph. Every time you open the Options window it resets the display mode setting to "Graphical and numeric display".
I was thrilled to see that there was a Vista Sidebar Gadget available (sadly only for 32-bit Windows), and hoped that it would offer a numeric-only display. By virtue of being in the sidebar I wouldn't have to worry about positioning either.
Nope. Only the combination graph and numeric display. I can't fix the app, but I've got some control over the gadget. I grabbed uncompressed gadget directory (%Program Files%\Windows Sidebar\Shared Gadgets\DUMeter.gadget) and began editing. The background was a fixed size so I created a new one that was the correct height of the numeric display. The stats window comes from a COM control which I very hackily modified the height of, to make it fit my new background.
The new gadget is supposed to be 28 pixels high, but there's an undocumented minimum height of 57 pixels for gadgets. This is due to the height of toolbar being 57 pixels. As a result of this the gadget will look a little odd if it's not at the bottom of the Sidebar – it's 28 pixels of content followed by 29 pixels of empty space.
Adding the DI Meter and DU Meter Mod Gadget
The modified and original DU Meter gadgets
You can download the gadget from my DU Meter Gadget project page.
