NINTEX - Fixing "User Cannot Be Found" in SharePoint 2010 Workflow Settings - Nintex Workflows

Fixing "User Cannot Be Found" in SharePoint 2010 Workflow Settings

*****Do not delete and try to republish the workflows after deletion. This will cause many issues and the related Workflow Tasks from the "Workflow Tasks" library will get deleted automatically.*****

SharePoint Designer Workflows
We started getting this error overnight on our SharePoint 2010 farm. Workflows stopped working, we couldn't republish list workflows, and we couldn't access the Workflow Settings page for any list or library on the entire site collection. The following error would appear:

"User Cannot Be Found"

Opening SharePoint Designer at the site collection level, we discovered that the Globally Reusable Workflows and Reusable Workflows were owned by user accounts that had been deleted. In order to fix this we used SharePoint Designer to open every workflow and clicked Publish with a static user account (i.e. the Farm service account or App pool service account). After republishing, all started working again.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Files

However, it seems as though files stored under the OLD profile in SharePoint do NOT automatically get updated with new owner settings when this happens.  Again, in our case, I was trying to run the Copy To SharePoint on files uploaded last April, before the change.  NONE of them would copy; all would fail with the above error string.  Yesterday with Nintex Support on the phone, we tried an experiment by downloading and re-uploading the affected files.  Once that was done, they could be copied without error. 

This post is just to make you all aware that IF you have made any AD profile changes like the one here, it *may* cause issues with the Copy to SharePoint action.  

________________________________________________________________________________________________
Nintex Workflows

You can resolve the issue using SharePoint Designer. You need to run the SharePoint Designer with the account listed in Farms Administrator & Site Collection Administrator Groups.

You can also use Command Prompt to start the SharePoint Designer using the below Command

C:\>runas /profile /user:dev\devacct "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Office14\SPDESIGN.EXE"
Enter the password for dev\devacct:

When you see the above error while you are using Nintex Workflows, you need to use SharePoint Designer and go to the location >> sites/corporate/_catalogs/wfpub/

Click on "Approval - SharePoint 2010", you will see the below listings. check in and check out the item for which you see the username which doesn't exist (found that the out of the box user was set to a claims based format e.g. "0;#id")

After checking in the item, REFRESH the page, you will see the sign changed after which the workflows started working.


Check all the root Site Collections and clear the usernames which has issues.