I'm trying to see how many people are using the compound gadget on their iGoogle page and have experienced the following: The child gadgets disappear and the compound gadget shows the message "Please use edit settings to move gadgets on this page into the compound gadget."

According to the gadget's page quite a few people are having the issue. Since it was a Google created gadget, I'm hopeful that they'll be able to recover lost gadgets since going to "Edit Settings" does not bring up the missing gadgets.

More here: http://www.google.com/ig/directory?hl=en&url=http://www.google.com/ig/modules/compound.xml

I should also mention the author has responded saying:

Thanks for the reports ktyliu – Dec 19, 2007

- it sounds like there are cases where child gadgets would be gone and unrecoverable; we will try to investigate and fix this as soon as possible. – for some reports, it seems the compound gadget is removed by user action (maybe by accidental clicks?); to give users a chance to restore the child gadgets, we don't remove the child gadgets immediately. You can add a compound gadget immediately and use edit settings to add the invisible child gadgets back. We do not do this automatically, because you can have multiple compound gadgets in your homepage, each with a different set of child gadgets.

I had this problem yesterday. I ended up logging out and logging back into my account and my child gadgets were back.

I'm having issues with my compound gadgets again. :(

Mine were completely messed up and I ended up just getting rid of them since I couldn't recover the child gadgets.

This was the response I had gotten back when I had emailed the gadget creator:
"If you accidentally deleted a compound gadget, then you can bring the child gadgets back.
But if child gadgets simply disappear, then there doesn't seem to be a way to get it back.
Apologies for any problem caused.

However, this seems to be happening to only a small portion of users (there's hundreds of thousands of users in all), and the root problem is unclear. We'll try our best to find out the root cause and fix the problem."

never saw this before- tried it, doesn't seem too user friendly to me.

Reporting same problem. In fact, gadgets have been kind of unstable .. don't know why. Occasionally, my several gadgets behavior strangely but refreshing the page returns normal.