I haven’t tried these yet (writing this from my Mac) but will later tonight. It seems there are a couple of new Vista Sidebar Gadgets available: Upcoming Appointments and Tasks. Robert McLaws posted about them here and links to a post by Ryan Gregg announcing them.

Robert mentions “at this rate I’m going to need sidebars running on both sides of my screen…” I’m guessing Robert is aware of this but I’ve encountered several folks who were surprised to see a bunch of Gadgets spread out across my desktop. It turns out you can “detach” Gadgets from the Sidebar and place them anywhere on your desktop. The other little known feature (at least from what I’ve experienced) is how the Start+Spacebar shortcut bring all your Gadgets on top of all other windows. This is pretty handy when using a bunch of detached Gadgets.