With help and patience from Nick Prior, the stats flash widget is no longer broken on my MovableType 4 dashboard. The stats widget shows a graph of # of comments and # of entries over the past 1-4 months. The fix for me was two-part:

• You need to create a 'support' directory in your mt-static directory
• If you keep your mt-static directory somewhere other than the default, you need to set StaticFilePath with the correct path (e.g. c:\Apache2\htdocs\mt-static\). (I kept reading this as the StaticWebPath setting, which is a more common MT setting).

Googling for 'StaticFilePath' didn't turn up any documentation on it, but it did lead me to this movabletype.org entry:

"Failed to create stats file" errors in activity log. If you see this error, you should create a support directory in mt-static and make it writable by MT. If you keep your mt-static directory somewhere other than the directory where the MT cgi's live, then you will need to set StaticFilePath in your mt-config.cgi appropriately. We will handle this situation better in the next beta--apologies for the inconvenience.

So I missed it there as well when I was scanning through the known issues.