When saving as an XML file using distributed save, it appears that the content of Dashboards you currently have open are saved to the current view of the model (under Tools/Workspace/TopLevel/DockingGUI2179624736 etc.) rather than the Dashboard or Statistics treenodes.
This causes significant problems for my team, because we are putting our model through a version control system, but deliberately excluding the content of "Workspace" so that we don't have merge conflicts every time someone resizes a window.
As a workaround, we've found that closing all of your Dashboards before you save forces the Dashboard content to be saved in the permanent treenodes (as long as the other person didn't have that Dashboard open when they saved), but this is obviously not ideal.
Is this intended behaviour or a bug? And is there a better workaround to resolve this than simply closing all of your Dashboards before saving or loading?