Widgets not updating

woke up this morning and no widgets in the sidebar of the site will update. i make a change. i save. and nothing changes on site. when i navigate to another page in the dashboard and back to the widgets page, any changes i might have made are gone, its reverted to how it was. if i moved a widget down into the ‘inactive widgets’ queue, it is back in the sidebar. if i erased some text from a text widget, that text is back again. etc. for any widget.

this is seemingly out of the blue. i’ve looked and there seems to be a ton of these cases reported, though all that i saw were pre WP 3.x. i didnt see any resolutions on the others i searched. can ANYONE solve this widget murder mystery? was it the butler with the candlestick? or mrs. plum with the uzi?