Samurize is a neat little program that is very customisable. It can be used to provide the user with all kinds of info such as: new emails, date and time, news, weather, mbm info, cpu usage, uptime, downtime, remote server info (for game servers for example), winamp and much more.
It includes a client file, which launches the program and a config editor which is use to make your own user interface and add the scripts you want/like.
You can make it see through, click through, position it where you like and move it around.
I started playing with it about an hour ago and you can see the result in the image of my desktop posted below, I made the blue box in Photoshop and add the scripts to the PNG file in the config editor of Samurize.
Link:
www.samurize.com