JAZZYGUY  WATCH OUT!!! Some irresponsible individual on the developer's staff made the default preference to start Yahoo Widgets on restart or log in. Turn it off in Yahoo Widget preferences.  
(Version 4.5.2)

PEEDEEBEE  My favorite Yahoo Widget was the Daily Planner, which would show you what's in iCal for today and tomorrow. But it hasn't worked since Leopard. (The Dashboard widget iCal Events can be moved to the desktop, but dashboard widgets always float above everything and won't go into the background.) Yahoo support has been stalling for three months. Today they suggested updating the Widget Engine to version 4.5.2, which, unfortunately, doesn't exist.  
(Version 4.5.1)

BRENTRN  v4.5 only stays in one Spaces screen. Crashes with some older widgets. Only widget game in town for me as Dashboard is broken when used with parental controls. Limitation to one Spaces screen seriously defeats usefulness. Yahoo also seems to have killed their forum for discussion of issues.  
(Version 4.5)

HILTONB  Is a version planned for OS X 10.5?  
(Version 4.0.5)

SPACECAT85  The last few updates seem to have fixed most of the major problems I mentioned in my review of version 4.0. YWE will periodically crash (widgets are still running, but the menu item + dock are gone), but I haven't experienced contextual menu or problems with Yahoo's own widgets crashing in awhile.

The design quibbles with 4.x that I described previously are still there, though. I don't expect them to change in a minor point release, so hopefully version 5.x will address some of those.  
(Version 4.0.5)

EASER  I find it telling that neither MacUpdate nor VersionTracker has a review that goes beyond version 4.0.3. It sounds like abandonware on the part of the users. It also sounds as if the Yahoo folks haven't listened to a word of feedback about their product; none of the updates appears to address any of the issues I've seen cited here. I for one will not use this program, although Version 3 was very nice.  
(Version 4.0.5)

SPACECAT85  Version 4 has some great new features but has been almost nothing but bugs for me. The idea of a dock with mini-states is great, as is the idea of browsing/installing widgets entirely within YWE.

My biggest problem with YWE 4 is that most of the widgets I've tried, including Yahoo's official set, either won't launch or will crash when I actually try to use them. On a similar note, widget-specific items will randomly stop showing up in the context menu, making it impossible, for instance, to change my location in Yahoo's weather widget. Clearing out all of my preferences and support files, then re-launching YWE doesn't help.

There's also a few small but strange design choices in YWE 4 as well. The developers changed the drop-down menu for widget display modes to something that's less intuitive when you're trying to just show a widget in the Heads Up display.

There are also some options that for some reason weren't included, most notably the ability to only show the dock in the Heads Up Display. It can either be completely closed or open with some portion showing at all times along one edge of the screen (including when it's collapsed).

And this is more of a suggestion than a complaint, but it would be great if there was a way to minimize a widget to the dock so that only the mini-state was visible. Yahoo's weather widget, for instance, would display the current weather in the dock, but the extended forecast wouldn't be visible.

I'm switching back to 3.x (which I'd give 4 stars) until they work out the bugs. 4.x has the potential to be a 5-star app, but the bugs and a few smaller design quirks that I and many others (see the official forums) have experienced hold it back.  
(Version 4.0)

TOMIS  Still no reason to use this over Dashboard.

I thought the sidebar might be cool, but it has numerous implementation flaws like the rest of the app.

I have to press fn-F7 for the global hotkey to work. Dashboard doesn't need the fn key. I can't drag widgets from the sidebar? Oh, I have to click them to load them. I set the sidebar to auto-hide, yet it still shows a sliver of it on-screen, wtf! How do I configure a widget? By right-clicking... and then messing with a clunky half-baked preferences window.

No-where nearly as elegant as Dashboard.

Still the same clunky interface, a long way to go in my book. And they're already at version 4?  
(Version 4.0)

TWISTERMC  Works ok on my iMac under 10.3.9 but the calendar widget now only pulls in my main iCal calendar and not all my subscribed to calendars too. So I feel lost. The previous calendar widget worked great. I've also had a few widgets crash. Sad.   
(Version 4.0)

EASER  Hey, at least it showed in your activity monitor. I can't even get it to do that much. Nothing shows up; nothing happens.   
(Version 4.0)