Windows 7 desktop gadgets appearing as white squares

[Debbie Rowe]

My system is running on windows 7 and I had some desktop gadgets like cpu meter, weather gadget etc but now they are appearing as white square with arrows facing left. They were appearing fine until yesterday. I don’t know what went wrong with them suddenly. Please let me know if there is anything that I can try to get them working again as previously.

[Big Fish]

Just try copying below lines in a notepad file, save it as Gadget_fix.reg, run it, reboot your system and see if they appear properly after that.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Windows\Sidebar]
“TurnOffSidebar”=- [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Windows\Sidebar]
“TurnOffSidebar”=-

Best of luck.

[Jasonholt]

I will suggest you to run sfc /scannow command, there are possibilities that some system file might have got corrupted. In such cases sfc /scannow command will carry out a small scanning process and will repair and replace those corrupted system files. You don’t have to do much, you just have to go to start, click on run, type “cmd” without quote and click on ok. Once you get elevated command prompt opened, type sfc /scannow and hit enter. A small scanning process will start for checking integrity of all protected system files. When scanning process gets completed, reboot your system and cross check if your desktop gadgets are appearing fine or not.

[Debbie Rowe]

I have tried following both solution and had no luck. Creating Gadget_fix.reg did not made any difference where as running sfc /scannow command, came up with "Windows Resource Protection did not find and integrity violation." Is there anything I can try here after??? Further help regarding this issue will be highly appreciated.

[Miltongomes]

Give below trick a try and see if you get any luck.
Run command prompt as Administrator, type below commands and hit enter after each one
regsvr32 msxml3.dll
regsvr32 scrrun.dll
regsvr32 jscript.dll
If you get “DllRegisterServer in <filename>” succeeded message for each command than reboot your system and see if things are back to normal.

[Debbie Rowe]

I ran all of the above command and I got succeeded message for each command as well but upon reboot things were not normal. I still see gadgets appearing white.

[Jacques25]

Which antivirus you are having installed??? Not sure but it seems as if your system has got affected by some kind of virus. I will suggest you to run a through scan and go through the result. If possible try using recommended antivirus like avast,avg etc, you can download and install their trail version for now.

[Debbie Rowe]

My system doesn’t have any virus, I have avast installed and I run scan on daily basis. No malware, virus or anything like them were found in whole system scan. There is something else that is causing this issue. I am just running out of ideas as I am not able to make out what causing them to appear like that. Since none of the above solution has worked out for me by now I am getting worried.

[Evoldo]

Try performing system restore. I think some recent changes in your system might have messed up something. I remember a case where one was facing exactly the same issue after installing some windows update. He had to perform system restore in order to get back things to normal. You might be having a different case but system restore will be worth a try .