wp_widget_categories_control question for 2.3

I’m trying to customize the categories widget to allow me to exclude different categories from three different Category widgets in my sidebar. (Categories 1, Categories 2, Categories 3) Each widget lets you Enter a title, choose hierchal sort, drop down, and show post counts. I would like to also include category excludes. Getting a textbox into the popup widget control form is easy enough, and I can even get it to put my entries into memory, but I can’t get the values into the widget_categories row of the database.
Could anyone give me some direction on how the values in the form in the wp_widget_categories_control function get entered into the DB. I can’t seem to trace it.

Thanks.