The other widget is probably better, but I thought I would add this in case someone was interested in using Julie's widget with the ArcPy backend. I personally am interested in trying ArcPy.
Yes you can get rid of the icons. You need to understand how the print widgets work first though. All of the export to pdf widgets are composed of two parts - the widget itself (Flex if you are using the Flex viewer) and a backend service. It cannot work on it's own without a backend service. Your options are the one with the Java backend mentioned later in this thread and the one with the Python based ArcPy backend, (and we have one in house with a .NET backend as well). If you want to use Julie's widget with the ArcPy backend, that is a separate download. They provided a link to it on the same page you downloaded the widget from. It is a separate setup for the backend. With the ArcPy backend, you create a geoprocessing service in ArcGIS server from the Python script. After that is done, you need to edit the widget configuration file and point it at your new geoprocessing service since the xml configuration file as downloaded is pointed at a sample server as you noticed. Since it is your geoprocessing service you can edit the python script to do whatever you want and use whatever mxd's you want it to use and edit them however you want.
One other item that drove me nuts. If you put the widget in the widgets folder instead of the samples folder it will not work unless you edit the skin location in source code and recompile the widget.
Hope this helps someone.
