Google seems to have failed me. Does anyone know of a hack that would allow me to have multiple Vista sidebars, since I have 2 monitors? I'd rather have that than flipping through different "pages" of the sidebar.

Thanks.

I don't have a Vista comp in front of me but could you check the exectuable or service that actually hosts the sidebar?

FordGT90Concept said:
Task Manager says sidebar.exe. It's located in C:\Program Files\Windows Sidebar\sidebar.exe. Opening a second instance yields no results.

Also, copying the folder to another area, and trying to run a second instance from there, even renaming the exe to sidebar2, still nothing. It seems like this should be easy, but I can't find anything.

this could be an extreme longshot that i highly doubt will work but try copying the sidebar.exe and paste it in another folder then rename it sidebar2.exe and then try running it

Sean Costello said:

Bitmap said:

Lol.

great minds think alike <.<

What I'm reading is it has a mutex so it is impossible to run multiple instances. A mutex uses multiple references to distinguish if a process is already running--much broader than just name/location. I'm sure there is a reason why they decided to do that but, as far as I can tell, it is not possible.

Just code your own! here I'll help you get started:

void main (void)
{
}

MrBungle said:

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;

void main()
{
// I would rather reverse engineer it, if I could

return ();
}

Bitmap said:

Hey look you're making progress already!

you forgot this one:

#include <beer.h>

Hmm, I doubt the sidebar is integrated into the .NET 3.0 or .NET 3.5 frameworks but if it is possible, that would be where to look.

MrBungle said:


lol good stuff

I think that sidebar.exe is actually the process used by the widgets (is that the right term?) to display within the sidebar. I had 5 widgets (?) and was running 5 instances, so I don't think this is the area to look under, a red herring.
You would have to find the underlying DLL that actually drives the sidebar instance links to the OS, then modify it to permit 2 instances or more. Have you attempted to post this to the Technet or MSDN Forums at Microsoft?

FordGT90Concept said:
I'm pretty sure it's either 2.0 or 3.0. Unless I'm mistaken (and I'm too damn lazy look it up right now) Vista shipped with 3.0. I'll do some poking around when I get home from work.

Gerritt said:
Odd. When I looked, and I have 8 or 9 gadgets running, there was only one instance of Sidebar.exe.

Sorry Bitmap, I use both the A word and the MS word.
The Gadgets that I ran that were not incorporated directly into the sidebar, but were downloaded from MS, and always opened a new instance of sidebar.exe. As I was already at 60-70+ processes, I turned mine off.