Thanks jmonroe0914 but the goal here is to prevent transparency for the clock.  I am not trying to make the taskbar transparent.

Hi, unfortunately those settings in the registry already are at 255.  It looks like the TClockEx superseed the settings of the taskbar's system tray transparency albeit there are no settings within the app.

The clock program you are using hasn't been updated in years. Actually from what I read it doesn't even support Windows 7 or up. I have no idea what OS you are using. 

Below is a link of a great working clock program. The person that makes this clock has been here on WC and told us about it. Many people have purchased it from here. There is a free trial if you wish to look and try it. It also will show the seconds if you wish. I receive nothing for giving you the link only trying to help you and show there is a clock available to use other than the Windows clock. You have question just contact the author and he will reply back. At least he always has but I have had no need to contact him in the past year. Yes after the trial you would have to purchase it but sometimes the good stuff is worth the purchase just like Stardock Programs.

http://drive-software.com/atomicalarmclock.html

If Rainmeter is heavy on resources, something else is going on as Rainmeter, by design, consumes a miniscule amount of resources and is entirely dependent on INI files.  I'll post a screenshot of my desktop later which shows a massive amount of ini's loaded (all of which are auto updated every .5 - 60 seconds) with a 0.6% CPU load and 26.9MB of memory.  If it was a while ago, it could very well have been a bug that has been fixed.  While Rainmeter does take a bit of time to customize, the end result is generally spoton since the user is designing ini's to their personal preferences (which is why what you can do with Rainmeter is limitless).  

As to the compatibility.... DWM (Desktop Windows Manager) has deep hooks within Windows and WindowBlinds is altering the complete UI of Windows with (I assume) either deep hooks on its own or piggy backing on DWM's.  One has to consider that the Windows XP and Vista interfaces were highly customizable, however this drastically changed in 7, even more so in 8/8.1. More likely than not, your issue is fixable by digging around the registry for the right key, however its time intensive and things can go wrong very fast if you don't backup every key prior to modifying (consequence of not doing so could be a completely trashed OS, with only a reinstall as a fix). My hunch is that TClockEx either specifies a specific area on the taskbar to not paint, or it overrides the taskbar for that specific area and paints with an alpha variable.  I could very well be wrong, as its a bit beyond my knowledge, however its an educated guess.  If it is done in such a manner, there's going to be a registry value somewhere for it.

As far as Rainmeter goes, there's two versions on their site, 1 a stable release [.31] and a beta version [.32].  I've used both and I haven't noticed any stability difference with any of the INIs I run.  I've included a screenshot to show how many INIs I have running (everything except the Comodo widget is Rainmeter), along with the Task Manager showing Rainmeter @ .6% CPU usage.  It does occasionally go as high as ~3.5%, however that's the highest usage I've ever seen with the specific INIs I run.  I have a 2nd gen i7 quad core at 2.2Ghz, 24GB of RAM with a 25GB - 50GB pagefile, as well as Seagate SSHD hybrid drives.  I know the Hybrid drives make a huge difference in the responsiveness of the OS and file system, so there is the possibility Rainmeter may use slightly more system resources than my current configuration uses; However, due to the basic nature of Rainmeter, I wouldn't think it would ever go above 5 - 6% of CPU usage with heavy INI usage. 

While rainmeter only includes a few INIs and just one skin (I think) [Illustro], you can find a plethora of others on DeviantArt.  I would also recommend checking out the Omnimo skin (google Omnimo), as having it run in the background provides more options for rainmeter INIs even if you don't use the Omnimo skin or INIs.

In reference to TClockEx, something occurred to me as I was writing this... have you attempted to run it in Compatability mode?  It's in the file properties and I would select XP SP3.  The other thing I forgot to ask is when you added it to the exclusion list in WB, did you also try selecting individual exclusions or just excluding the entire application (there's a bunch of checkboxes towards the bottom that address individual issues).

 (You'll need to click on the image area to go to OneDrive, as for some reason, it's not allowing the picture to be shown within the reply)

The new version I downloaded seems morre stable and uses less ressources.  Your computer is a beast, mine is an old laptop with i5 at 2.4Ghz with 6Gb or RAM and a very basic video card (Intel on board).  So the impact Rainmeter has on your machine is minimal because of the huge amount of ressources you have compared to mine.  Anyways, I do run it since yesterday and so far so good.  I only have 3 ini (date, time and weather) but that's enough.