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I’ve been recently playing with changing themes on my Wordpress blog and I kid you not I probably installed more than 10 themes in my attempt to find the perfect one.
I finally realized the futility of all this and decided to settle on the Thesis Theme which is a premium theme. Premium just means I had to pay for it. 
Well, I proudly installed my new Thesis Theme and when I went to Appearance>Widgets to add my Archives and Recent Posts to my sidebar lo and behold these widgets were showing as though they were already installed in my sidebar. The “Add” option was not available…even though the widgets were NOT present in my sidebars.
I just couldn’t figure it out so off I go to the Thesis support forum (really cool btw) and post a question about my problem.
After receiving a couple of answers from some very nice fellows it looked like the problem was related to all those theme changes I performed on my blog.
Basically, this problem can happen when you have a theme using 2 sidebars and then change back to a theme with only sidebar.
It was suggested I reinstall my previous theme, delete all widgets from it then uninstall it and reinstall my thesis theme.
Unfortunately, that didn’t work but after much googling I stumbled upon a plugin that lets you uninstall ALL your widgets.
That did work like a charm and I finally had access to all my widgets within my Thesis Theme.
The plugin is called widgets-reset.
If you need to use the plugin just make sure you take a backup of any code you might have in your Text plugins as this will really reset all plugins all data in them will be lost.
Cheers!
~Michel
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for linking to my plugin. I wanted to add: This sometimes appears to be a problem with the number of sidebars, but the real problem is that each sidebar has a unique ID. The widget itself is tied to that particular sidebar’s ID. So, when you change themes, the sidebar ID(s) could be different.
It looks like this issue is being corrected in WP 2.8 with an “inactive widgets” area, so the plugin probably won’t be needed after that.
Either way, I’m glad I could be of some help.
Thanks Justin for clarifying this and for all the help you give to all wordpress users around the world.
Michel