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The Penalty for Failing to Install a SharePoint Theme Correctly—Lose All Themes!

This item languished on my TODO list for months: “Custom Site Theme for SharePoint 2007 (MOSS 2007) and WSS 3.0.” I was feeling pangs of guilt for procrastinating until it became clear, the price paid for following the deceptively simple instructions. The form of the error is this:A theme with the nam e "THEMENAME 1011" and version already exists on the server. Blog and forum posts like the one from Sean have comments that essentially say, “Delete the _themes folder in SharePoint Designer and the problem will go away.” My problem is that I do not have SharePoint Designer installed nor do I have any folders of the pattern _theme* on my entire WSS box.

What is more ominous is that none of the phrases in the SharePoint error message above appear under Microsoft TechNet or MSDN umbrellas. In “Customizing MySite in MOSS 2007” a Microsoft employee gets a reader comment about this error but has no real solution to this “caching” problem.

What should have tipped me off is that articles from Microsoft about installing custom themes are too hard to find. This should have aroused my suspicions.

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