Help! Widgets not working!

I just started with WP I have been trying to add a widget and it doesn’t show up.

I switch to the sidebar I want it in then click add widget then save changes then view page and it does not show up. My theme supports widgets.

I deleted some things off the sidebar page that I was not going to use. I had like 5 sidebars now I have 3. Could this be the problem?

edit ed from here
I just re-uploaded my sidebar page from the theme backup on my HD so now it has a meta, sponsor, and tag cloud which I don’t want at this time. There are widgets for these but they are not showing up as widgets installed so the the only way I can get rid of these is delete them from the sidebar.php page.

any suggestions