WIndows 7 gadgets discontinued

[Shackleford]

Am I just late to the party on this one? Apparently they were discontinued due to a security issue. I liked having my WMC and weather gadget and recently they went corrupt or something and lost opacity and turned purple. I was trying to fix but just ended up disabling them when I found this http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/gadgets.

[cncb]

Yes, this was a while ago. They ruined a good thing as usual. With Win 7, they inexplicably removed the sidebar from Vista and now no gadgets at all in Win 8. It is very irritating how they take away features instead of just allowing the customer to turn them on/off.