I have a bunch of Gadgets ruing on my Windows 7 64-bit desktop. Most of them are from addgadgets.com and have not received updates for a while. But from what I understand, this is issue not related to the gadget creators, but Windows 7 itself. Anyway reloading the "sidebar.exe" processes does resolve/fix/repair the frozen/broken Windows 7 gadget issue.
They are buggy and freeze-up every now and then (Or get all weird pink/purple). In the reference image below "Drive Meter" and "Digital Clock" gadgets have crashed, got broken, got frozen and mangled with PINK...
Before I would reload the frozen ones manually, one-by-one, but then I came up with a few line AutoHotKey script that refreshes all of them at once.
^!s:: process, close, sidebar.exe Sleep 150 Run sidebar.exe return
The hotkey for the script is Ctrl+Alt+S. The "Sleep 150" part can be removed, but I noticed that sometimes it still reloads with errors and having some time delaybefore restarting the "sidebar.exe" process seems to resolve the issue. In the reference image below "Weather Meter" gadget is having issues after reloading "sidebar.exe" process with the "Sleep 150" part of the code removed.