Finally made the vicious network widget do what I want it to.
Ie: the network connections show up whenever they are connected so that
they are not always there and so that they don't vanish if there is no
traffic occuring over the connection.
Also made it switch to mb only if the transfer rate is over 1 mb/mB???
instead of switching as soon as there is something on the mb/mB scale.
Applied the same fix to the disk widget but I still can't figure out how
to only show the widget if the disk is mounted, so for now the disks
will vanish if both read and write are at 0kb, except for sdb because
that is my default linux disk.