How to Delete a Windows Live Writer Blog Theme and Use the Default View Instead

Windows Live Writer has a great feature that detects the style of your blog and allows you to write posts in a way that looks similar to your site, but sometimes it goes wrong, and there’s no easy way to fix it.

Here’s how to delete the cached blog theme so that Windows Live Writer will use the default non-themed view, which maximizes the amount of space you have to write.

Downloaded Theme Gone Wrong

Here’s an example of a blog theme that just didn’t work right—look at all that space over there on the left side of the screen. Awful!

The Default Non-Themed View

This is the default view without a blog theme applied, and it maximizes the amount of space that you have to write. Much better.

How to Delete a Cached Blog Theme

To get rid of the theme files and use the default view instead, you can open up Windows Explorer and paste in the following to the location bar:

%appdata%\Windows Live Writer\blogtemplates

This will show a list of the blogs that you’ve got setup in Windows Live Writer, but sadly they are all in GUID folders so you’ll have to explore to figure out which one is which—for my purposes, I had just added the last one, so I chose the folder with the latest date.

Once you get into the folder, you can see all of the cached files, and if you open some of the index.htm files in a browser, you’ll be able to figure out which one is which.

Simply delete all the files in this folder—you might want to make a backup first, of course—and then close Windows Live Writer and open it up again. You’ll see the default view.

This tip probably won’t help that many people, but it’s something that I’ve used numerous times in the last year and figured I would share.