I’ve been having the exact same problem for ages now with the Mystique theme. I’ve tried deactivating all of my plugins as well as getting rid of all other widgets that are in use other than the Twitter widget and I’m still having this problem. You are correct in that it seems like it only works about half the time.
I’m really starting to wonder if it’s not simply a problem with the data that Twitter is returning through the AJAX call. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least…
