I'm working on implementing an iGoogle Dashboard like customization of a portal dashboard, and wanted to leverage personalization for quick save/retrieve of widgets' positions;  Based on the description of use for personalization found  at this link (http://www.adefwebserver.com/dotnetnukehelp/Personalization/) I put together some code but found that while I could retrieve the data saved, I could not retrieve the data on subsequent page loads. To simplify this (and see if I was overcomplicating things I stripped this down to the following and still - subsequent page loads (and subsequent AJAX requests utilizing the same code) fails to retain the previously set (and retrieved) values.

string test = (string)Personalization.GetProfile("testPersonalization", "test1");
Personalization.SetProfile("testPersonalization", "test1", "welcome");
test += " :  " + (string)Personalization.GetProfile("testPersonalization", "test1");
return test; 

(This outputs ": welcome" both first & second time)