First off thank you Tim for creating the Feedreader and making it available to everyone. We rolled it out to our MOSS 2007 environment and it has worked well. However we have ran into an issue with it when adding a 2nd web front end server to the farm. The web part won't work across servers when trying to pull a feed from someone's MySite. I've found from reading your posts that this is expected because of authentication issues. That's fine because we found a work around.
The problem I face now is that the web part was used in many sites to connnect to multiple external RSS feeds. This functionality still works, even across multiple web front end servers. I need to ensure that no one uses the feed reader web part to try and connect to something within the intranet since that functionality doesn't work. The feed reader web part isn't in the web part gallery so I can' t hide it that way. I'm assuming since it is deployed as a solution that's why it isn't in the gallery. I did notice that it shows up under the server web part gallery (its the only one there in fact) but I don't have the option to hide or delete it there.
Does anyone know of a way to make this web part unavailable to users without uninstalling it? I can't uninstall it because it will break in multiple sites.