SharePoint 2010 Corrupt Navigation Nodes

Symptoms:

• Response was extremely slow
• Only affecting a single Site Collection
• No errors in the Event Viewer
• Still able to browse the site structure through SharePoint Designer
• Errors on the screen said something like:
• Error occurred while rendering navigation requested url
• An unexpected error occured while manipulating the navigational structure of this Web.
•  Noticed that, when a page did load, it had dozens (hundreds?) of Navigation nodes on Current navigation and Global Navigation

Suspected Cause: 

Thought that maybe the reason this was taking so long to load a page, was that the Navigation is corrupt and it was trying to build out this enormous navigation structure.

To fix:

Open PowerShell on the server, check the size of those objects at the top level:

$siteUrl = "http://WebAppURL/sites/scname"

$spWeb = Get-SPWeb $siteUrl

$spWeb.Navigation.QuickLaunch | ft Title

$spWeb.Navigation. TopNavigationBar | ft Title

  

Then, if this looks like the problem, delete the QuickLaunch Nodes, then delete the TopNavigationBar Nodes, as required:

$siteUrl = "http://WebAppURL/sites/scname"

$spWeb = Get-SPWeb $siteUrl

    Foreach($node in ($spWeb.Navigation.QuickLaunch))

{

    write-host "The node title is "$node.Title

    $node.Delete()

}

$spWeb.Dispose()

$siteUrl = "http://WebAppURL/sites/scname"

$spWeb = Get-SPWeb $siteUrl

    Foreach($node in ($spWeb.Navigation.TopNavigationBar))

{

    write-host "The node title is "$node.Title

    $node.Delete()

}

$spWeb.Dispose()

Note that I had to run these commands several times.  It looked like it would delete 80% of them, then get an error.  If this happens, then just run it again:

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