Unable to edit Navigation Settings page in SharePoint 2010

Question

I have a strange issue with the Navigation Settings page in SharePoint 2010.

Two sub sites on my site collection have a lot of sub sites, pages, etc, below them, so the left quick launch navigation has become very long. I am now unable to edit the navigation. When I open the Site Settings-->Navigation page, Internet Explorer immediately freezes and eventually crashes. I am assuming that this has to do with some kind of limit for nav items in SharePoint, but I didn't receive any kind of warning or error message to indicate that we had reached a limit.

I've tried to remove some lists and libraries from the navigation by going into the list or library's settings or a sub site's navigation, which all work fine. This hasn't fixed the issue on these two sites, though. I thought about changing the settings so that only sub sites, not pages show in the navigation, but I am not able to do this, as this is done on the nav settings page which I am unable to edit. Before I start asking content owners to find sub sites or other items to delete I'd like to know for sure that this will help. Has anyone else experienced this? Did you find a solution?

Answer 1

You can try the following in PowerShell:

$w = Get-SPWeb http://url-of-site
$pw = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.PublishingWeb]::GetPublishingWeb($w)
$nav = $pw.Navigation
$nav.CurrentIncludePages = $false
$nav.CurrentIncludeSubSites = $false
$pw.Update()

Answer 2

Have you tried to edit the navigation on another computer or deleted your local browser cache. The navigation control use much of the local cache.