While experimenting with my nodelets setup, I reduced the enabled frontpage nodes to (Node Status, Chatterbox, Nodelet Nodelet) and "use frontpage nodelets everywhere". Then (still on the user settings node 1072) I tried using the Nodelet Nodelet to turn on a random additional nodelet, and it did that but also unset the "use frontpage nodelets everywhere" option, so that all the default nodes appeared.
Based on a quick experiment, it doesn't appear to suffer the same problem if you try this from a node other 1072; I'm guessing that index.pl has some special handling to cope with this submit button (name="sexisgood") when the hiden node_id is 1072.
Hugo