Person or Group Column Type Broken after Renaming 'Title' Site Column

Question

I made the all-too popular mistake of renaming a title column and pushing out the changes via inheritance. I quickly reversed the change by renaming it back to Title. Now, when I use the Person or Group column type in a list or content type, the Check Names functionality doesn't work. It looks like one of the hidden fields that makes up the P or G type has been renamed from "Name" and is now "Title" which is causing my grief. Is there any way to reset the P or G type or rename just that field back to "Name"?

Answer 1

If your solution is truly what you need to accomplish you may be able to do this via powershell or the utility SharePoint Manager.

Answer 2

Who knew that after putting in 9 hours in on this it would only take 1 more hour to solve?

The Person or Group column type is actually base type Lookup. It looks its values up from the "User Information List" ({7c68ed5b-0cd0-4848-8796-839dd18c240b})--you know, the one that shows the people list when setting permissions. There are 4 occurances of the "Title" column ({fa564e0f-0c70-4ab9-b863-0177e6ddd247}) in this list that were changed as a result of renaming the parent (they must be custom columns based on the OOTB Title field). They have static (internal) names of Title, LinkTitle, LinkTitle2, and LinkTitleNoMenu but ended up with display names of "Title" instead of "Name". Once I changed their Title attribute from "Title" back to "Name" (using this indespensible little tool - http://spm.codeplex.com), the P or G column type was back to normal but I STILL couldn't get the Check Names functionality to work. It must be due to some JavaScript I'm using on the page. Hopefully this little exercise will at least help others get their P or G column back to normal.