I have no reason to question dnngo personally, I have had very little contact with them. I just want to mention that I have noticed some of those asian characters in one of my sites recently and dnngo is not involved in that install. FYI. Sorry that you are having so much trouble with this site. It might be true that starting over with a new install might just be the best idea.

I just want to mention that I have noticed some of those asian characters in one of my sites recently and dnngo is not involved in that install.

that is good information. as you can see i have jumped around quite a bit in my conclusions. so there may be an innocent explanation to my troubles after all. the only certainty i have is that using the dnngo theme allows my site to load. when i remove that theme, pages fail to load and generate the windows event i reported above. with so little firm evidence, it is hard to report anything to anyone as the response will be, it's not my problem. however, i will report it as a potential security item with the usual caveats and codicils.

ps - based upon the stack trace, it looks like something may be related to localization. i feel that something is missing there but don't know enough to update the db tables appropriately.

pps - i believe that dnn platform is completely open source. if true, then i could download the code to debug. shouldn't i be able to run my site as localhost locally? huge pain and probably not worth it.

 

to wrap up the discussion, i installed a new instance of dnn 9.6.1. out of curiosity i had to test the dnngo skins. i discovered that i could use them, replace them, and have a mix of it and other themes. best of all, the w3p exceptions went away. this is a brutal way to upgrade, but 2 weeks is long enough futzing with a problem.

the moral of the story is that you cannot always upgrade in place an existing installation of dnn and may be forced to do a fresh installation. on the other hand, i suspect that my installation's corruption was rather unique. i also did not feel like debugging the code as i had suggested.

I'm glad you are back in business! and even better, you have your dnngo themes back. All good except all the labor and time and frustration. But yeah, you work with websites. You are used to those things. :)

And yes, you definitely can run your site locally. There are a list of reasons that you might choose to do this including troubleshooting a site locally instead of online and visible to the world. I also choose to do demos to clients or presentations with a local copy so that internet connectivity (or lack of it) does not negatively influence my presentation.

The best way to get started running one locally is to work with https://www.nvquicksite.com/

Thank you to David Poindexter for nvquicksite.com

Just to add to Mark's comments ...

I think that the best way to upgrade is to copy your production site to a dev environment.

You'll be able to test upgrades without affecting production. When you have perfected things, back up the production installation and copy over the upgraded installation from the dev environment.

The downside to this approach is that you can't make changes to the production site once you have made the copy for dev. In this case, once you have figured out how to do the upgrade, you grab another copy from production and do the upgrade. Then move it back.

To help in doing all of this, take a look at Evotiva's DNN Backup and Restore module. Using it reduces the backup, copy, and restore operations to a few button clicks. The cost is a the same as a couple of hours of work.