CRM error when opening a form due to invalid role

One of my clients was running into a particularly nasty issue earlier this week. They were unable to open any kinds of forms related to contacts, opportunities, or accounts. Trying to do so gave a generic error - it wouldn't even start to open.

After some investigation, it turns out they had deleted a role which had been assigned access to several forms. For whatever reason, CRM did not clean this up, and it left a bad reference in the customizations. This led to an odd error; anyone who had access to the form was able to open their forms without issue. Anyone who did *not* have access to the form would be given a generic error when opening any other form for the same entity. Unfortunately, attempting to reassign the security for the form or import a copy with the role stripped out generates errors - it appears that we have a circular error!

Luckily there is still a way to fix this. Simply perform the following:

1. Open up the form with the bad assignment and save a copy.
2. On the copy, set up assignment as normal.
3. Delete the old form.
4. Rename the copied form to be the same as the old form.

This will forcibly remove all references to the bad role, and allow users access to the system again! Note that if a dev/QA system is in place, the next push to the live server will create another copy of the form due to a GUID mismatch. In this case, be sure to delete the correct form.