Rainlendar is a skinnable calendar that sits on your Windows desktop, and it has saved my keister on several occasions. If you're as non-organized as I am, you've no doubt encountered what I call "the boot nightmare." You're booting up your computer in the morning. Suddenly, you break out in a cold sweat. "Am I supposed to be in a meeting right now?" To find out, you have to wait for the boot, for your mail client to open and replicate, and then for your calendar to open--and now you're 10 minutes late for said meeting, if it isn't a figment of your imagination.
Rainlendar is light, and if you have it set to start when Windows starts, it'll probably be the first thing to appear on your desktop after a boot. A quick glance at Rainlendar's event list will tell you when/where you have to be--and you can be on your way long before your mail client starts. There's even a built-in to-do list for handy little things like "Make sure you're wearing pants before you go to the meeting."
There are two distinct versions of Rainlendar. I've used the old version (0.22.1) for years, and can attest that it's in no way buggy--and there are a ton of great skins for it. The new version (2.x) (which also is available for Linux) comes in two flavors: Lite (free) and Pro (not-free). Lite is more or less similar to the old version, although you can't use the old skins with it, and there aren't a lot of new skins out there. Pro costs €15 (around $22) and includes support for shared calendars, and synching to Outlook and Google Calendar. I haven't used Pro myself--I have few enough meetings that manually entering them into Rainlendar isn't too onerous. (<edit> The old version does include an Outlook plug-in that is not enabled by default. Works great!</edit>)
You can get Rainlendar skins from the product site, from WinCustomize's Rainlendar gallery, and from deviantArt's Rainlendar gallery. Keep in mind that most of the skins you see are for the old version--if you aren't sure after reading the writeup, it's probably meant for the old version. Most authors of new skins will explicitly state that their skin supports Rainlendar 2. When you download a skin, extract it to the Skins subdirectory in the product installation. Then, either restart or refresh Rainlendar (right-click and select Refresh) for the skin to show up under Skins in the right-click menu.
My favorite old skin is aerial RL and my favorite new skin is Vitrum.
Rainmeter is a light, skinnable system monitoring application for your Windows desktop. Although it is primarily used to monitor system resources (like CPU, memory, disk, etc.), it's really more like a gadgets/widgets framework. (This is especially true since many skinners are using Rainmeter, because of its easily scripted interface, to create Windows Vista sidebar clones for XP.) You can find "skins" that support RSS and weather feeds, control various media players, check your e-mail, and so on.
Rainmeter product development has been discontinued, but you can still download it from the old Rainy's site. Really, if you want desktop gadget functionality without all the memory overhead of the more commonly known frameworks (such as the Vista sidebar, Google Gadgets, and Yahoo! Widgets), it's hard to beat Rainmeter. The downside is that there aren't a lot of great Rainmeter skins out there--your choice is rather limited, and you often end up having to tweak a skin to get what you want.
The best places to find Rainmeter skins are deviantArt's Rainmeter gallery and Customize.org's Rainmeter gallery.
After getting used to Windows Vista and my sidebar gadgets, going back to XP on my work laptop was difficult. On Vista, if the system seemed a bit sluggish, a quick glance at the sidebar would tell me if my CPU, memory, or network bandwidth was pegged. To stop myself from bringing up XP Task Manager every ten minutes, I installed Rainmeter, downloaded the Bars-English skin, copied the CPU meter and hacked it to display my second CPU, and I was in business.
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