It seems that not having to login when you start your PC is pretty important to everyone. I've received quite a lot of feedback asking me to change the login model of the Gadget.
So (listening to you) in the new version (available now at Live Gallery) you will have to login just once and after that your session will be persisted even if you shut down your PC. I've also made some improvements on the way the gadget handles no Internet connection (so no JavaScript error messages from now on ;-)).
As for some problems regarding the gadget crashes mentioned earlier, these are not actually crashes. When you have a large number of Data coming down from Facebook the gadget may seem unresponsive but it's actually working, downloading and rendering data. You will have to wait a while (how much depends on the size of your data e.g. number of friends, groups etc.) to get the results rendered.
Unfortunately the Facebook API doesn't support paging, thus all the data have to be downloaded when you issue a request. So there is not much I can do with the downloading part but I can render only a portion of the data, thus saving some time from the rendering. Note that the time saved is actually going to be very small (I believe that you won't even notice the difference) as most of the time is spent for downloading data.
If this is a problem most of you have then I might even consider cutting off the set of data presented on those lists and only show the bare minimum, to make the gadget faster. In the friends list that would mean showing only the names of your friends for example (no photos etc.).
What do you think?