Yes, it does. Thank you very much indeed.

Originally, I had been getting accurate vote information because I had opened the widget in Safari to check the basic layout and XmlHttpRequest logic (both of which work in Safari); this of course meant that it had picked up the permanent cookie which I already had, so I got the votes. When I opened it in Dashboard to get the preferences and so on working (those need the widget object, which Safari doesn't support), it didn't have that cookie anymore, so poof, no votes.

I figured this out this morning just after I woke up; I'm glad to see that my idea was correct.

Now whether people are going to be comfortable with a widget asking them for their perlmonks password or not is another consideration altogether. At the moment, I've simply got logic in there that ignotes the votes if they come back as -1. The interface will need some reconsideration if I'm to add login as well.

You are correct; the code is indeed all Javascript, and I refrained from posting it for that reason, figuring I'd just tick off yet another set of folks. For anyone who's actually still interested after all this, I'll probably have the widget-without-votes ready on Monday. It's all artistic tweaking after this point - mostly the icon.