Matt, what you just said about "other countless plugins" using the same technique... dude, that theory doesn't hold water. The theory that countless other plugins are broken (and in my personal supercharged 3rdparty plugin mishmash, so far I haven't found any that uses this technique) does NOT matter ZILCH in the face of the fact that Widgets also needs fixing. I respect your opinion, but the "other boys do the same brokenness as well" argument just doesn't fly with me :-)
It should float very well, but I hate how you assume that because some plugin does what the WP core does with no issue on a regular blog, it is therefore "broken". I'm not sure where you found your definition of broken, but they've been working pretty darn good for us for the past few months.
Your solution is twice as hackish than anything in the core right now, and is fundamentally broken a few ways. First plugin that does chdir() breaks everything. chrdir() is disabled on many servers for security reasons.
- First plugin or auto-prepended script to do chdir breaks everything.
- getcwd()'s value changes to be unusable with its context, for example during shutdown, where its value becomes "/"
- I still fail to
