The blog theme could not be downloaded.

I, like many, use Windows Live Writer for blogging. I have a new machine and was having to move everything over. But I couldn’t get the theme to refresh. I kept getting a message, “The blog theme could not be downloaded.”. This this post on Windows Live Writer Fails to Download and Update Theme by Norm. My issue was slightly different. I had the number of blog posts to show set to 10 posts. I had some very long posts with many images in that collection of 10 posts so the display time was too slow. So, I changed it from 10 to 1 for the update period, then put it back. Here is the settings for Reading that I’m talking about.

So I hope this helps others. And I have it here for future reference. The real lesson here is to look for items that would prevent Windows Live Writer from seeing the temporary post. Things like, the post was set to private (and it doesn’t have permission), the display is too slow, the results are cached with a plug in, you front page is static and doesn’t contain the latest posts, etc. I’m sure there are many other possible causes.