[Plugin: Sidebar Widget Collapser] can’t get full sidebar back

Can you describe the behavior you’re seeing after deactivating?

Even when active, it won’t actually remove any content, and if you deactivate it (and especially if you’ve actually deleted it), I don’t think it’s technically possible for it to still be affecting the output.

A picture is worth the proverbial 1000 words

Hopefully that links you to my Picasa album showing the problem. There you should see a picture of the Plugins- Installed page. You see on the left that there are icons only, no text in that column (Dashboard, Posts, Media, Links, Pages,etc.). Further down you see that the Sidebar Widget Collapser is deactivated; deleting it entirely had no effect either.

So I want to restore the text to the icons in the left hand column.

Ah, I think there may be some confusion here. This plugin (the sidebar widget collapser) works with widgets on the publicly accessible side of your site, not within the admin section.

The ability to collapse or expand the links on the side of the admin pages (yours are currently collapsed) is a part of WordPress itself, so that would explain why deactivating / uninstalling this plugin will not change that.

To expand them again, you should be able to simply click on any of those arrow links, which appear immediately above the icons.

sure enough, that is what happened, which is weird- I thought your plugin worked with the publicly accessible widgets, as you describe, but the admin sidebar collapsed concurrently with installing it. I must have done it inadvertently just at the same time. Thanks for the info