Updating Widget options in custom install.php

So, the actual problem was that I wasn’t setting any defaults my custom widget needed to display any content. The widget actually was there, but as I had emptied the title and set no other defaults, it was rendering nothing. My fix for this was two-fold.

1) set at least one default in my install.php file

update_option( 'widget_vvnumetawidget', array ( 2 => array ( 'title' => 'Meta Links', 'register' => 1, 'login' => 1  ), '_multiwidget' => 1 ) );

2) put some logic in my custom widget to display a message if it is installed, but no configuration is set.

Thanks @Nathan for getting me to look a little closer at those settings arrays.