For me, the layout posted by praneetloke made the widget disappear from preferences that have an associated widget, e.g. a checkbox. There is a LinearLayout with id/widget_frame that is needed for the widget. The following worked for me, on Android 2.3 through 4.2.2. The only change that I needed to make was set android:visibility="gone" on the layout that contains the preference icon, which was not available in Gingerbread.
References: The default dimensions used in the layout are here GrepCode /res/values/dimens.xml. The actual preference item layout is here GrepCode /res/layout/preference_holo.xml. Note that there is also a non-holo version called preference.xml.