Gadgets were found to be insecure ages ago. You should have uninstalled all of them. [URL]
Since a few days, all of my Win7 Gadgets are responding very slowly; Task Manager and Process Explorer indicate that SIDEBAR.EXE is eating up about 10% of the 8 virtual (4 physical) cores of my i7 CPU, one of the cores oscillating between 0 and 100% just for this process. Among the consequences: quick battery drain and unnecessary fan noise. So far I have tested the following workarounds, without success:  I have a few third-party gadgets, all of them worked flawlessly so far (and none were updated lately). I can't think of any change in my system lately (software, drivers, etc...), that could have caused this. Killing sidebar.exe immediately pushes CPU counters to zero. As soon as I open the gadgets panel or load any one of the built-in or third-party gadgets, the problem starts.  WIN7/64 SP1 and Avira antivirus are fully up-to-date. BIOS and drivers are up-to-date (Precision M4700)  Thanks for any tip. (question cross-posted on Microsoft Answers and Avira forums)
Win7 gadgets (sidebar) slow and CPU-hungry lately, without apparent reason