BTW, FYI, Here’s the reason that the dashboard widget options “somehow” got corrupted:
The option_value for dashboard_widget_options is a serialized object (like many other values in that table). The PHP serialization syntax depends on the lengths of strings being fixed. In the process of transferring the data from my local machine to the live server, I dumped the database (using MySQLDump) and did a search-and-replace on localhost, changing it to the real domain (www.saverskeepers.com, in my case). “www.saverskeepers.com” is 12 characters longer than “localhost”, and that threw off the deserialization when the option was read back in.
