F12 works to open and close it in my snow leopard but when I click and drag a little bit keep holding down and press F12 again it just disappears with the rest of dash board.
For those where it's not working and you did the upgrade to SL, I'd try deleting the dashboard preference file - move it to your desktop, log out and back in - Located at:
Users / your user / Libraray / Preferences / com.Apple.dashboard.plist
(Not the dashboard.client file)
Then I'd try a repair permissions - seen it fix some strange things lately.
bobtomay: I deleted my .plist file and logged out/in. Didn't bother with permissions. Same problem, plus regret for resetting my Dashboard to stock. Luckily, I don't really want this functionality. I was just geeking out, that's all.
Now restoring my custom Dashboard by putting back my .plist file from the Trash...
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