C/D/H Talks Tech

I had a call from a client this morning that was experiencing errors when editing instances of an InfoPath form and in search results. The full error was:

Web Part Error: One of the properties of the Web Part has an incorrect format. Windows SharePoint Services cannot deserialize the Web Part.  Check the format of the properties and try again.

My first thought was “weird”. I have come across this error before, but only with custom developed web parts. Being that the edit form and search functionality are using all out-of-the-box features, this seemed strange. As I started to Google for some ideas, I found a couple articles of interest:

1) OK, your C: drive could be full…that is easy to fix, you can see Hannah Scott’s post for details: http://bytelab.blogspot.com/2007/05/moss-webpart-errors-due-to-log-file.html

2) Alternatively, Shai Petel has a great blog for troubleshooting this error: http://kwizcom.blogspot.com/2008/06/unable-to-add-selected-web-parts.html

Under “Reason 5″, Shai mentions that after deploying DLLs to the GAC you should perform an IIS reset to register safe controls. 

Sure enough, Windows Updates had inadvertently been pushed to the SharePoint environment.  I performed an iisreset /noforce and the error disappeared from our InfoPath form and search.