Rainmeter

[Fuganater]

http://rainmeter.net/RainCMS/

Anyone mess with this? I saw it in the bit-tech 'post your desktop' thread. Looks pretty wicked. Was going to give it a try when I get home from work.

[diluzio91]

Yea, theres a couple threads floating around on here.

[mDust]

I have it on my netbook that's running XP. I didn't really find it as useful on Vista or 7 as they have a sidebar with gadgets. It works very well and there are tons of skins and plugins for it. If you care to, you can make your own as well.
I've got an analog clock, date, a to-do-list, battery meter, and Katana running as a makeshift sidebar. It's currently using 2-5% of my CPU...but it's a crap single core Atom @ 1.33Ghz.
I'd recommend it especially for XP, but it loses some luster on newer OSes. If you're into it, you can make some crazy moving background stuff such as clocks and meters I suppose. I've combined things that looked cool but got annoying pretty fast.

[Twigsoffury]

Yahoo widgets is a hell of a lot better then rain meter IMO.