Weather gadget not working- Cannot connect to service

Astonishing! Your solution worked for me as well.  Thank you very much.

Since March 1st, tried "100" other tricks published on the Internet and nothing else worked.

I gave up and tried to install other weather gadgets, widgets, apps and weather software and  I was not happy with them: too much memory usage or to big displays or they dragin  a lot of extra gimmicky toolbars. I know about security exposure, but nothing happened via that gadget last 8 yrs and Symantec hopefully can catch intruder.

 

Same as your father, I (70 years old women, previously also IT specialist) use the weather gadget a lot. Live in Calgary were temperature can drop or rise a lot: Chinook winds have been observed to raise winter temperature often from below -20°C (-4°F) to as high as 10-20°C (50-68°F) for a few hours or days, then temperatures plummet to their base levels.  My outdoor thermometer is behind a window covered in ice and I have to go out with my dogs a lot. That old weather gadget is a winner for me.

 

Thank you again.

No problem I'm so happy it is working for everyone. Makes me feel good actually.  I spend 10 hours a day troubleshooting and engineering solutions for military and they expect quick results. I guess I am used to that routine now because when my dad said he had no idea what the temperature was outside because the gadget stopped working I was all over the Internet last night from about 6pm to 9pm earching for solutions. Every trick you tried I am sure I tried at some point. He was watching American Idol trying to reply to some Outlook email and everytime I found a different potential "fix" I would just snatch the laptop from him and give it a shot. I don't think he anticipated that I would end up coming up with my own fix lol. But he told me hat it says 37 degrees and fair skies (snow storm is over) so he's happy. And at the end of the day, that's all that matters :-)

Gold Star for you, sir.

 

This is kind of a brute force approach and requires a known good machine, but we all have plenty, right?

 

 

Yes sir, when all else fails (and there were at least 7 different attempted fix fails) brute force approach is the answer :-) Before I overwrote the files I did notice that both my dad's config.xml and system.ini files seemed to be missing some information when compared to mine. Also, inside the weather gadget cache folder was three xml files on my machine while his did not have any. I am still not sure what happened, but my guess would be the the gadget hit a fault, crashed and auto-restarted. I noticed that when the gadget looks for a temperature update the xml files inside the cache change (time stamp). This appears to be controlled by the setting.ini file. Perhaps while in the middle of an update, the weather gadget hit it's fault. That would explain the missing information and the missing xml files in the cache.

This is a great fix if you have access to another Windows 7 PC, however, is there a solution for those of us who don't?

What are microsoft doing about this?