Sharepoint Designer 2010 won't display lists of libraries

Question

Not quite sure what I've done to screw up SPD2010 (was working), but it displayed

Sharepoint Designer cannot display the item

  What you can try:
    Click refresh ... blah

  Most likely causes
    The file has been deleted from the site
    The site is encountering problems

I can't see anything related in event viewer. I think is web service related as I think the queries are made via a WS?

Answer 1

It appears this was caused by a "phantom" list definition. I experienced a number of other problems (some in SP some in SPD), all generating variations of this error;

    <nativehr>0x8107058a</nativehr><nativestack></nativestack>

The problem list definition was deployed and undeployed from VS2010, so I have no idea why it was still around! The Sharepoint UI wont allow you to remove it (errors as above), so the trick is to use the stsadm powershell command with forcedeletelist as detailed here

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262609(office.12).aspx

Hope this helps someone else !