It definately was a Visual Studio problem. No matter what I did. No web projects were showing when I selected new site. None. Just a few generic templates and NO custom templates at all.
What I think happened was...
I had to install an older version of Oracle to work on something for a client. When I removed it the uninstall program was less than up to the task so I had to follow some steps to get it to be completely removed. Then I ran a registry cleaner to get rid of the excees. I think that is what messed up Visual Studio for me. Doing the steps found on the web did not do anything for me. I actually had to uninstall and reinstall Visual Studio. Once I did that all the web site projects returned, including the DNN templates.
Anyway from googling it I found a lot of posts saying that registry cleaners often remove entries important to Visual Studio.
"Still scratching my head here on why you thought you had to rename the zip file?"
I don't have to.
I read on a post found on google, that Source Forge downloads the tempate install files (.vsi) as (.zip).
It works fine if you unzip and double click the .template, but renaming the file to .vsi saves you the step of unzipping and then deleting when you are done. Not nessesary but makes it easier in my opinion.
theMouse