I need to display part of the exposed form in my page's sidebar, and the rest of the form and content in the $content area. There's really no good way that I can find to do this. I sort of got it to show up in a way by making a "block" view with "exposed form" set and then trying to only show the part that i needed through .tpl files. The problem is that then, when the submit button is clicked (the submit button is in the $content area), then the filters that are in the sidebar are not taken into account.
Some lateral thinking... Why not explore CSS-only options? You can place that form element playing with position:absolute ? Or (considering is a right-sidebar) float:right and then some negative right margin to push it to the sidebar? If you are using 960 grid system, play with pull and push classes.