The news that Weather.com had cut off WeatherPanel's access to its data sparked a torrent of outrage from you guys yesterday. And rightfully so – it's a darn useful app.

But never fear, as the with all things Windows Mobile, you just know someone's going to come up with a workaround for a problem. And that rings true for WeatherPanel.

PPCGeeks member tcbusch has posted a .dll fix that will restore WeatherPanel back to its former glory. As tcbush explains:

A little over a year ago I received an email telling me that weather.com was going to require authentication. At that time I knew WeatherPanel was going to stop working when this policy was enforced. I thought about how to overcome this issue and created a webserver redirection scheme that would embed the authentication into the url query that weatherpanel sends to weather.com. I have been sitting on the code for over a year waiting for the day that arrived earlier in the week. ... I implemented my fix on a server to verify it worked.

So, you have two options:

1. Download tcbusch's fix (unzip the new .dll file, make sure WeatherPanel is disabled, and replace the old file in Program Files>Marsware>WeatherPanel with the new one.)
2. Just download the updated CAB file.

Let them never say it can't be done! And thanks to thacounty in our comments for the tip!

For those who use the stupendously awesome WeatherPanel, which was originally developed by MarsWare and kept alive mostly by graphic genius StoryR, you may have noticed your battery draining like crazy yesterday and your device heating up like a burrito.

Reason for it is Weather.com, which was providing the weather data for the application, has revised its TOS.  It now specifies:

You may not use the service to create weather and weather-related products to be displayed on handheld or other wireless devices.

Which seems to be a direct shot at WeatherPanel users. In turn, this has caused your devices to keep hitting a dead-end on the weather URL to retrieve info, pulling down massive amount of garbage and killing your battery (via data connection).

At this point, your best bet is to disable WeatherPanel via the Today Screen and follow this thread at ppcgeeks as users brainstorm ways to fix it.  Hey, this app has been brought back to life so many times already, anything can happen ;-)