Working with Widget after Instance loses the reference

[Al in Dallas]

I made the mistake of creating an instance of a widget and assigning it
to a name I'd already used. Now, if I use root.children or
root.slaves(), I can see the "lost" widget, but can I do anything else
with the string of numbers that shows up when I use root.children? I'd
like to destory the widget, for example. it would be even better if I
could create a new name and have it reference the "lost" widget.

Of course, I can just kill my toplevel and start over.