It's perhaps worth saying that Widget Killer now works on Windows as well as on Mac OS X, thanks to Laurent, who provided code for the Windows platform.

Laurent: There are two problems. I don't have a Windows system that can run the Widget Engine and I have no idea how this would be done on Windows. This Widget uses the ps and kill Unix commands.

A Windows version of this Widget would be great. When a Widget is locked in an infinite loop, the Control+click trick often doesn't do anything and I never know which process to kill in the Task Manager as they are all named YahooWidgetEngine.exe. Having this kind of tool would be very useful especially to Widget developers.

One more thing: I always keep a thesaurus by me because they're so useful in expanding vocabulary. What word means the same as "killer" but carries a "James Bond"/spy-movie kind of glamour? ASSASSIN!

Although if you want to make your widget do more, well, you can think of another name, like "Wowser" for Widget BROWSER.

Constructive Suggestions:
Kind of boxy. It'd look better if it left off the ".widget" extensions. As far as usefulness, I'd much prefer ctrl or ctrl-option, but this would probably be better for some people.

I hear this widget just screaming to be a full-featured widget manager, opening, closing, and passing messages to other widgets. It could have icons, a dock-like magnification effect, and live updating when the widget folder changes or other widgets open/close/gain focus/lose focus.

I'm giving these stars to the program this is destined to become someday!