Good lord, that is a scarry screenshot. IE, MS Outlook, Frontpage, and the XP Fisher Price theme all in one go.

*shudders*

Anyhow, yeah, Active Desktop does have some interesting uses. At my old house, we had a Windows box in the living room for web browsing something seen on TV or whatever, and we used AD to load a server status web page that also listed the health of the internet connection. So at a glance of the web station, I knew if something was wrong.

Konfabulator on the Mac is similar, as all the "widgets" are just little web pages with javascripting and such. 10.4 will integrate that technology, called Dashboard.