Well, the best I've done so far is Headline Viewer. It lets you customize *everything* from hundreds of sites, but it lacks the "news ticker" mode that I really want, so it takes up a lot of screen real estate. I still use it, and it's pretty nice... If the selection of what's news and what's not is your concern, try that one out.

The night I posted that message I did some *exhaustive* net searches for such a program, and tried at least 15 of them out. Each of them had their problems. The biggest problem I found was that most of them wanted to either dock to an always-on-top taskbar, or they wouldn't let me drag them to my 2nd monitor. The ones that weren't plagued with these problems were just plagued with not having the right selection of news sources. Some were just plain ugly.

So for now I'm sticking with Headline Viewer, it's got all the content I want, just not the presentation.