Throwing away your widget preferences can make your unresponsive widgets start working again.

 

Ever since I upgraded my iMac to Leopard, my Dashboard widgets aren’t working properly. How can I fix them?

 

Not sure exactly what your specific issue is, but there are two common problems that users have been experiencing with their Dashboard widgets since upgrading to Leopard. The first is that upon entering Dashboard, no widgets appear on the screen. This problem can be reproduced by switching to or from an account that has Parental Controls enabled. Apple has fixed this issue in Mac OS 10.5.2, so running Software Update on your machine should take care of this for you.

 

The second problem is that the Dashboard widgets will appear successfully on the screen, but they won’t respond to any mouse clicks. If this is happening to you, you will need to trash your widgets’ preferences. Navigate to ~/Library/Preferences and view the contents of that folder as an alphabetical list. You will see a series of files that start with “widget-com” near the bottom of the list. Drag all of these files to the Trash, and then log out for the changes to take effect. When you log back in, your widgets should respond to your mouse clicks again.