Sometimes things don’t work from one moment to the other if you do MOSS 2007 / WCMS development. Usually it’s due to a mistake I made and usually finding it is difficult since some error message aren’t really useful:

• MOSS 2007 / WCMS development – Site columns and error The given key was not present in the dictionary
• MOSS 2007 / WCMS development - Failed to instantiate file "default.aspx" from module "MODULE": The specified list does not exist.

This time I got a “List does not exist” error together with a COMException.

Problem description

This problem occurred after loading a site collection I have created with the out-of-the-box publishing template. Here are more details about the problem:

List does not exist

The page you selected contains a list that does not exist.  It may have been deleted by another user.
Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException: List does not exist

The page you selected contains a list that does not exist.  It may have been deleted by another user.

Here is a picture with the error:

Solution

The only thing I did was an iisreset. I couldn’t imagine a reason for this error so I thought about a reboot. Since this takes more time I did an iisreset and after that everything worked fine after reloading the site collection.