Appwidget lifetimes and persistance of data

So tonight's aggravation was caused by the letter null. Basically I couldn't figure out when I was trying to get my Speed Widget to work, why I could create a locationManager and initialize it, but subsequent calls would throw a NullPointerException.

The solution (as with most things), was to RTFM. If you look at the documentation for BroadcastReceiver (Which AppWidgetProvider is extended from), you would see:

A BroadcastReceiver object is only valid for the duration of the call to onReceive(Context, Intent).

So that pretty much solved why my local variables were disappearing each time. I figured that appwidgets had funky lifetimes, I just didn't know where to look.