I tried the Social Icons plugin from ThemeGrill and used the EL Shortcodes element and they displayed as soon as I pasted in the code and was able to go out and back in without the error.
I should have also mentioned, that inserting the WP WPSP Widget worked as well, with one caveat. I initially got an error on the front end, but when I selected a different WPSP list, it worked. And then when I selected the fist one (that gave the error), it worked as well … go figure 🙂