I’ve been running with Windows Server 2008 as my primary desktop OS now for a few weeks and one of the things that I had not got to work was Sidebar.  I found several blog posts on the net where people claim to have it working but following their steps always resulted in failure.

More specifically running sidebar would show the icon in the system tray but the app would immediately exit.  Turns out that I needed on extra step.  So, without further delay, here are the steps I did to get sidebar working in Windows Server 2008 x64.

  1. Copy the Windows Sidebar folder from c:\Program Files on a Vista x64 SP1 installation to your Win2k8 install.
  2. From an administrator console run:
    regsvr32 sbdrop.dll
    regsvr32 wlsrvc.dll
  3. From that same console run:
    sidebar /RegServer
  4. Move the Sidebar registry information from a working Vista SP1 x64 install.  You can find it at HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows/CurrentVersion/SideBar.
  5. Run sidebar!

Here’s a screenie showing it working on my setup.

sidebar