In our old MOSS 2007 farm we had a branding feature deployed that swapped out CSS Files, Master Pages, etc for our sites to keep a consistent branding across our Site Collections. We are currently in the process of migrating to 2010, after doing so we noticed that our Style Sheets and Master Pages were looking rather ugly so we deactivated them across all collections to be updated later.
However, when we created a new site template .cab file, we noticed that we couldn't create a site off of the template, getting error messages referencing the old branding master page stating "could not locate oldbranding.master" essentially. I opened up the .cab file, modified every XML file containing reference to the old master pages and then the site template worked fine. But why is this? Where could a reference to the old master file be hiding still? Thanks!
