In need of a decent Event/Calendar plugin!

Looking for a decent enough, free or one time low cost, Event listing or Calendar plugin. There’re so many out there so why not ask the masses for help! This may seem like a tall order but, here we go…

Needs to live in a small space on a sidebar. Would be great if it looked somewhat presentable and function well enough in said confined space. Preferably it would be a static footprint. For example, a square or rectangle that’s able to scroll through event postings inside its outline (kind of like the cut/paste Google Calendar we once used). It’d also be great if each post could, say, either show in a popup instead of taking over our site or perhaps expand inside the confines of the calendar-layout without making our site elongate and look funky.

Hopefully the above descriptions make sense.

The calendar we use right now elongates our site when a user clicks to “see more”. It just looks bad – and there’s no way to close or shrink it back to shrink our site back together. In another of its setting, as more events are added, the site ever expands downward to accommodate more and more posts so our site stretches and stretches ever onward.

Any thoughts and suggestions would be great.

Thanks!