I have a "weather" widget in my control bar (in German: Kontrollleiste) at the bottom of my KDE 4.8.4 plasma workspace. This widget keeps crashing lately. How can one remove widgets from the bar. I can only see a menu entry for ADDING widgets. Thanks for you help. Regards H. Stoellinger

right click the widget -> remove this _________

You must first click anywhere on the panel or desktop and click "Unlock widgets".
Then you can right-click on widget and remove it (as google01103 said).
You can also click little "cashew" icon to open panel configuration. Then when you hover your mouse over widget, little box will appear with widget name and cross icon, which you can use to remove it.

As last resort, you can also log out and manually edit ~/.kde/share/config/plasma-desktop-appletsrc, but I doubt it will be necessary.

yea - I always forget the "unlock" step as I don't lock my widgets

Thanks for the prompt answer! That's great! I suppose my widgets were unlocked anyway, because there was no menu item "unlock widgets". But I have removed the widget. Let's see if it has vanished. Thanks again.

Things may have changed a bit since the introduction of kde4.

I had two widgets that I wanted to remove. One was removed easily by editing the control bar, hovering my mouse pointer over the icon and clicking the "x" on the bar that appeared over it. Simples.

However, the second widget, which is a link to a program which no longer exists on the PC, does not respond in this way. The bar with the "x" appears, but when I click the "x"c nothing happens. I've tried (twice!) editing plasma-desktop-appletsrc, but the icon name keeps reappearing in it.

Any idea of how to remove a reluctant widget?

This was a bit kludgy....What worked for me was:

-Rt Click on icon-to-be-removed, on your panel. Select "panel options"->"panel settings". This opens another horizontal bar above with "Add widgets", "Add spacer", etc on it.
-While that bar is visible, CAREFULLY move your mouse-point DOWN back over targeted-icon.
-You should now see another pop-up with the wrench and "icon" in text, and the X. Click the X. Bammo!!

What is really confusing about this UI is that I'd expect when first click on an icon/widget, I'd get a 'X' or a remove option there....not sure why not.
The thing that really confuses (and scares) people is there is the "remove this panel" option which might be a bit tempting for one to select....

What worked for me, Plasma 5.10.4, was to right-click the panel, panel options, panel settings. Then, I got the red x to remove the widgets. Looks like an evolving process to make changes.