I never have had good luck with VPN's. In the past they slowed down my computer. Proton worked great at first. Didn't slow things down a bit. Then the dreaded give us more money message came up.

I was gonna go back to xwidget but anytime I even click on their website Malwarebytes says it's no good. Bad JuJu. 

I turned widgets on from Taskbar settings and I have a little thing in the taskbar that shows a small icon and the weather conditions. It's all I got.

Oh one other thing. I did reinstall Winstep and it works ok. It's version 22.7. The weather feed for me is not working. It always shows 43F degrees. I tried it on other towns and it works fine. I am destined to be weather widgetless.

Wait I checked Workshelf and the weather widget is working showing the proper Icon and temp.

v22.7 is nearly 4 years old. Since then I've released v23.11, v24.4, v25.2, v25.6, v25.7, v25.9, v26.1 and I am just about to release v26.3. They’re all packed with new features - definitely worth checking out, especially if you are on Windows 11. On the v26.1 announcement page, click the "older news" link on the right panel to see the feature summaries for the previous versions.

I cannot even get xwidget installed, Mirosoft security hates the download

Take your time, Chuck. 

You can use my weather widget in the meantime...