SharePoint Lessons Learned

Exception occurred. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80020009 (DISP_E_EXCEPTION))

Background
I wanted to quickly make a copy of a publishing site collection that I had been working on (for a colleague), and did the following.

First, as stated above, the site I wanted a copy of was a SP Publishing Site. I knew from preious experience that one is unable to save a publishing site as a site template (it's not supported by Microsoft for good (although unfortunate) reason).

That being said, I moved forward with an unsupported workaround (FYI, this was in a development environment). I deactivated both the Site Collection and Site/Web Publishing Features ([Office SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure], and [Office SharePoint Server Publishing] respectively). Once deactivated I had the menu option "Save site as template" available to me (under Site Actions >> Look and Feel ), and was able to successfully save the site as a site template.

Upon my attempt to reactivate the site collection publishing feature (that I had deactivated in the previous step) I ran into the following exception:

Exception occurred. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80020009 (DISP_E_EXCEPTION)) 

Solution
To resolve this problem I ran the following stsadm commands (replacing "URL" with the actual URL of the Site Collection) - which I found on a Technet forum, posted by Chris Winebarger.

stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishing\feature.xml -url http://URL -force
stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishingresources\feature.xml -url http://URL -force
stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishingSite\feature.xml -url http://URL -force
stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishingweb\feature.xml -url http://URL -force
stsadm -o activatefeature -filename publishinglayouts\feature.xml -url http://URL -force
stsadm -o activatefeature -filename navigation\feature.xml -url http://URL -force

All was then back to normal.

Reference:
Chris Winebarger's post on a SharePoint Technet Forum 
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/sharepointadmin/thread/13da092f-8c6f-44c8-a99b-140e277c8d55