Metropol

i don't know if such a thing exists, but i'm looking for one of those desktop enhancements which puts things like memory, cpu usage, ip address etc etc on the windows desktop, but the thing is open source.

i want to write something myself for work which monitors our servers, but i'd like to examine the code which actually paints the application on the desktop - there are a couple of ways to go about this, including using the windows alpha effects which are build into the gdi driver, but they're a bit slow, so i just wonder if they use a better efficient engine.

any help would be greatly appreciated!

there are a few widgets for Konfabulator (Yahoo Widget Engine) which do that. I presume you can hack into those what with them only being HTML/JavaScript