How do you remove a site from Sharepoint Designer?

Question

I would like to use Sharepoint Designer 2007 as an html editor. I have a web site with a lot of files in a folder on my hard drive. I do not want Sharepoint Designer to make a web site out of this. I just want to use Sharepoint Designer to edit the html files, locally.

If I ever make a mistake and click on a tool for Sites, such as summary or report, Sharepoint Designer will decide that my folder is now a web site. From that point on, Sharepoint Designer is painfully slow whenever I open a file contained in the folder that Sharepoint decided is my web site, instead of being instantaneous like it was before.

I can resolve this situation by renaming the folder containing my web site -- everything gets fast again. I can also fix it by uninstalling and reinstalling Sharepoint Designer. Neither of these is a good solution. Is there a place in Sharepoint Designer, or in application data or the registry that I can kill off the Sharepoint Designer web site that's associated with a folder on my hard drive?

Answer 1

I'm not certain this will fix your issues (as I can't easily recreate the situation you describe). But I do know where SharePoint Designer tucks away metadata about the websites you open and edit.

The next time SPD converts your folder to a web, shut down SPD and delete the contents of the following folders:

WebsiteCache:
XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\WebsiteCache
Vista/7: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WebsiteCache

There is one file in WebsiteCache you may wish to keep, which is Websites.xml. This contains the "shortcuts" you see when you go to File > Open Site...

Web Server Extensions:
XP: C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Web Server Extensions\Cache
Vista/7: C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Web Server Extensions\Cache

Whenever SPD gets wonky about reporting which files are checked out/in, really slow to open, or just generally weird, we clean out these folders and things return to "normal".

Hope this helps!