Why are you dealing with the image at 180 dpi and not the 72dpi screen resolution? At screen resolution the image will be roughly double that size. Still, the size is manageable for any browser.
When creating a gadget, you should be using PNGs for all the elements of the gadgets. Are you having issues displaying JPEG photos?
Have you looked for the yellow bar at the top of IE that blocks certain suspicious content from being loaded (popups, activex, javascript, etc.)? If it appears, try telling it to "allow".
Lastly, what are you using to compress your images to JPEG?
EDIT: If you want to do batch conversion use the batch converter in photoshop or use the Actions panel to record the conversion process for a single image, then replay the action on an entire folder. Additionally, you can save this action to a "droplet" which is a small application containing the action that you can drop an image or folder on top to.
Alternatively, if you don't fell like learning Actions, XNView is an excellent image viewer and converter that supports something like 160 different image formats and can batch convert and batch rename huge lists of files.