I hate to say this but I'm glad to see I'm not the only one with this problem, and glad too, to say, I found my cure (ymmv). Go to thisURL
and grab the instructions and deb for installing bash. Once you have rm the symlink for /bin/sh to busybox. Then replace it with ln -s /bin/bash /bin/sh. Reboot. (once you are sure the symlink is good.) Reboot . At this point for me I got my widgets to re-appear, in 2 months not a single problem, and no more lost widgets.