Garbage on a SharePoint Site’s Main Page

Occasionally I get a call from clients that their main page for a site has been “corrupted.”  Upon further review I can see that it’s actually a copy of a Word document.  It appears that they’ve accidentally saved a Word document as default.aspx.  Unfortunately the clients rarely have SharePoint Designer – it’s a right click to fix this within SPD (Revert to Site Definition.)

Fortunately, however, there’s a way to fix this without SharePoint designer.  There is a page in layouts called reghost.aspx that allows you to reghost – or uncustomize – a page.  So you can append _layouts/reghost.aspx to the url to get this page.  Let’s say that you have a site at the url http://wss/foobarred you would type in http://wss/foobarred/_layouts/reghost.aspx.  On the page that appears you can reghost (or uncustomize or revert) a single page – or all the pages in the site.  Enter the URL of the bad page or ask for all of the pages and hit the Reset button and the page will return to the format on the file system.

It’s a nice way to work around the cursing that happens when a page is accidentally overwritten.  (Both what appears on the screen and what happens behind the keyboard.)