Windows 7 Bizzare gadget problem

So I recently crammed Win7 onto my new netbook and have run into a problem with gadgets. The preloaded gadgets all seem to work fine but anything i download from the web and run ends up as a white block on my desktop. I have UAC on and I'm fairly sure its not drivers since the gadgets the OS started with work fine. My guess is its a compatibility issue but that seems sort of odd to me. Has anyone else encountered this problem and found some sort of fix?