Properties lost when widget is updated

Question

I have created a simple widget using the Widget Factory. I've entered some Properties in Captivate and it works fine. However, after updating the widget in Flash and then clicking Update widget in Captivate, my Properties are gone (although the change was purely cosmetic and all objects stayed the same).
Can a widget be written in a way that it would preserve its Properties between updates?
One way that comes to mind is that it could use User Variables to store its Properties and then intelligently read them as default values after update (similar to http://www.infosemantics.com.au/widgetking/2010/11/widget-properties-how-theyre-used/). But it would burden the course designer to create a variable for each widget instance times the number of its properties and naming them somehow specifically. (unless widget can create User Variables itself, but can it?)

Answer 1

This is the default behaviour that Adobe has designed for updating widget versions.  It wipes out properties settings in the Widget Properties dialog.  And at this time Captivate does not allow widgets to create user variables in the main project. 
However, there's actually an easy way to get around this.  Just add the same (old version) widget to another slide in your project and hide that slide.  Make sure you insert the widget from the same folder location as other widgets in the project of the same name. When you want to update to a newer version of the widget, copy the new version widget to the original folder location so that it overwrites the old version of the widget, then go to the hidden slide in your project and right-click Update the widget. 
This will update all widgets of the same name that were inserted from the same original folder (Captivate remembers the source location) but only the widget on your hidden slide would lose it's properties settings. All of the others in the project will retain them.