How do I remove widgets from Dashboard in Mac OS X Tiger?

I have to admit, after being pretty impressed by all the innovations that were promised with Dashboard when Tiger was released onto the world, I actually don't find that I use Dashboard at all, unless I accidentally press the f12 key on my keyboard.

Nonetheless, like you and probably like lots of other folk, I do find that I sporadically download and install new widgets because they're fun, amusing, or ostensibly useful.

Every so often, though, it's time to clean things up, and to do that in Dashboard you need to launch Dashboard, then click on the "X" in the lower left corner of your screen. It'll then push everything up and present the launch strip of widgets. More importantly, adjacent to the "X" should be a new link "Manage Widgets":

If you don't have that link, I'd be quite puzzled: I'm pretty sure it's built in to the Dashboard system itself. However, let me step through the usual way of managing widgets, then we'll come back to that issue, okay?

Once you have the Widget Manager running, it's easy to remove any specific widgets you don't want to have running in the Dashboard environment:

You'll notice that some have a red circle icon with a line through it: if you click on that icon you can physically remove the widget from your computer entirely, as shown here:

Unchecking a widget just means that it's still on your system, but isn't launched automatically when you bring up Dashboard in the future.

If you can't get Widget Manager to work, then you can always delete widgets manually by going to either /Library/Widgets (for those widgets installed for all system users) or /Users/yourAcctName/Library/Widgets (for those installed just for yourself). It's pretty easily understood, I think:

$ ls /Library/Widgets
Address Book.wdgt       Phone Book.wdgt         Translation.wdgt
Calculator.wdgt         Stickies.wdgt           Unit Converter.wdgt
Calendar.wdgt           Stocks.wdgt             Weather.wdgt
Dictionary.wdgt         Symantec Alerts.wdgt    World Clock.wdgt
Flight Tracker.wdgt     Tile Game.wdgt          iTunes.wdgt

Fairly straightforward, all in all.

Hope that helps you out!