Changing Page Layout “Value does not fall within expected range.” Error

We just did a Site Collection backup from a development environment into a staging environment.  The development environment can only be accessed through a VPN while the staging environment is available through the Internet.

When I went to change the page layout for a site’s welcome page (default.aspx), I got the following error:

After some research, it seems that the page in the staging environment is probably still pointing to the page layout on the development environment. See the posts below for some thoughts on this.

http://stsadm.blogspot.com/2007/08/fix-publishing-pages-page-layout-url.html
http://blog.thekid.me.uk/archive/2007/08/20/fixing-page-layout-urls-after-importing-a-publishing-site-in-sharepoint.aspx

Both of Gary and Vince are talented guys and I trust their analysis of the issue.  In my case, I’m just going to delete the sites and rebuild rather than trying to run the fixes they suggest.  (My client isn’t allowing me access to the server in staging.)