“How To Repair Your Crashed or Hanging Vista Sidebar” by The How-To Geek is a step-by-step tutorial on how to fix a frozen Windows Vista sidebar.
If you install a lot of different Vista Gadgets you might have come across a situation where your Vista Sidebar no longer is working correctly, or possibly even crashing or (more frequently) just hanging. You can reset the sidebar back to the default settings with a very simple tweak that we’ll explain here.
This tweak is as simple as backing up a file and then renaming it… and when the Sidebar starts back up again it will reset to the default settings.
The fix works by renaming the configuration file used by Vista’s Sidebar. When you rename this file and restart the Sidebar, Vista creates a new configuration file with the default settings. You will need to re-add all your gadgets, but as The Geek says that is not really an issue since the Sidebar is not working in the first place.
