Weather Sidebar gadget problem

[forrestcupp]

I'm running Vista Home Premium 64-bit. I've been using the Weather and Stock gadgets in the Windows Sidebar without trouble the whole time I've had this computer.

But within the past two weeks, the weather and stock gadgets quit updating. I deleted the weather cache and now it just says "Service not available". Obviously, I have internet access because I'm using that same computer to type this post. I've done a lot of Googling about the matter, and the only thing I've found is that it doesn't work properly unless your region settings are set to English(United States). So the only real fix I've found is to change your region to English(United States). Well all of my region and locale settings are for the United States; they always have been, and I've never changed them.

By recommendation, I also switched to the old patched wlsrvc.dll file. When that didn't fix the problem at all, I just reverted back to the standard dll.

I was going to just switch to Google Desktop until I found out they don't support 64-bit. Does anyone have any other ideas how to get this working?

 

[KSoD]

Try repairing the sidebar with the steps listed here:

Sidebar Problems

 

[forrestcupp]

Thanks Mak. That was a pretty good resource, but it didn't work. I tried everything in that thread, and I'm still getting the "Service not available" thing.

I'm not running any firewalls, either. The only thing I have running like that is AVG Free antivirus. I haven't installed anything new lately. I don't have any idea why this would be happening.

 

[KSoD]

Have you tried to use a different Weather Gadget from the Vista Sidebar site?

Windows Vista Sidebar

Maybe it is just your gadget itself that is corrupted and not the sidebar?

If all else fails, delete the Weather Gadget folder from the Windows Sidebar\Gadgets folder and replace it with the files from this folder.

Weather.Gadget.rar - Windows Live

That is the ones for the Weather Gadget that works on my XP/Vista and Win7 installs. Yes I did say XP in there as i have teh Sidebar in XP as well.

 

[forrestcupp]

Yeah, I meant to mention that before. I've tried about 4 other 3rd party weather gadgets, and none of them work. It's not just weather. Stocks and RSS feed gadgets don't work, either. It seems like every gadget that needs to access the internet doesn't work.

I tried deleting the weather gadget folder and replacing it with the rar file you linked to. That didn't work, either.

I saw something someone posted that made it seem like theirs stopped working after installing the Java JDK. I haven't intentionally installed that, but I may have had a normal Java update. Who knows?

Thanks for the good advice even though it wasn't what I needed. I hate to reinstall Vista just to get the sidebar working.


Edit:

HEY! I figured it out.

I always use Firefox, so I had no idea that Internet Explorer wasn't working. Evidently Internet Explorer has to work for those gadgets to work. The problem was that a while back I had installed Privoxy to block ads. It set up a proxy for IE. When I uninstalled Privoxy, the proxy settings didn't get changed back. So that rendered IE unusable until I unchecked the 'Use proxy' box. So now that I have IE working, all of my gadgets work!

Thanks for all of your help.

 

[KSoD]

Glad you got it sorted.