SharePointHosting.com's - SharePoint Demystified

One of the common causes of SharePoint page malfunctions or poor performance is the closed or corrupted web part. This issue comes across my desk two or three times a week. A user forgets that the Close option from the web part menu is not the same as the delete option. After awhile of closing many, many web parts the page load time goes through the roof. Known issue. You need to delete web parts when you don't want to display them on a page any longer. The other common issue is that a developer or SharePoint Designer will be working on a site and while they're figuring out the data view web part which you can add through SharePoint Designer they close it so users don't encounter something on the page which isn't done yet. Then they forget it was there and add three more, or perhaps the data that those web parts are bound to somehow changes and now they become corrupted and the page won't load. Again, known and common issue.

To deal with this you are going to want to do two possible things (1) see if you can still open and the page and if you can just go and delete the closed web parts (2) if you can't open the page in your web browser you are going to want to go open the site up with SharePoint Designer. The closed web parts are grayed out as shown in the video below.

Check it the screencast by clicking the screen grab below or by clicking here, "Working with closed web parts in IE 7.0 and SharePoint Designer"