Hi all,
This is just a post related to a problem I had that I resolved. I've seen a few posts in here and on other forums regarding this type of issue. Since I seem to have resolved it, I thought I'd just share my own experience in case it might help some other frustrated person like me. I'm using DNN 4.5.5.
Situation:
I woke up one day and said hi to my production site which replied with a, "An error occurred." That was it. Nothing I tried could get the site running. After a while of searching forums, I stumbled across the solution that said to change all the "-1" values in column SupportedFeatures in table DesktopModules to 0. I did this and also started reviewing the EventLog table after each test. It helped get rid of the "Parameter Type" error as expected so that is good.
The problem is that this seemed to cause a new problem with unhandled error loading the page, specifically with a problem at DotNetNuke.Framework.DefaultPage.LoadSkin(String SkinPath). So, I did more researching the forums. I couldn't find a solution so I decided to take a step back and think about my situation. I wondered if something had happened to my binaries or had a rogue module (with a trial timer) on it that could cause problems.
My Solution:
I compared all of my binaries on prod to my local host and found they didn't match my local version of the site. I replaced all of my production BIN files with my local BIN files, and made sure the prod database table DesktopModules matched what I had in the BIN folder. This seemed to "fix" the problem. So, just for fun, I went back and changed the values of the modules I had set to 0 from -1 BACK to -1. It seems to have continued working, though I do have DiskCaching turned on (which I suspect was possibly part of the problem too, so i nuked my diskcache files)
At any rate, this was a very brute force (and ridiculous) solution that seems to have worked for me. I am sharing it just because, well, I hope it might help someone else.
(FYI, I just clicked the "Insert Smiley" button below while typing this in and it throws a server exception)