SharePoint Development & Administration + InfoPath

I recently wanted to display data from a Web Service on a page in SharePoint using XSL.   The Web Service was external to SharePoint, which resulted in the Data View web Part being unable to obtain a valid result required to allow the XSL template to be built using features of SharePoint Designer.  A separate issue was that the method used to query the web service hosted on my external server consumed resources on the external application and took around 5 seconds to receive a response from the query.  Using a Data View web part connected directly to the Web Service to display the result would require that the data is obtained every time the page loads, impacting on server performance.

I have an InfoPath form template with a large number of fields and groups in the main data source, as well as a large number of secondary submit and retrieve data connections. After making some changes to the form template, I was able to save (and publish) the updated version of the template. When trying to re-open the template in design mode, i recieve the following error: "InfoPath has encountered an error. The operation failed." I found that a blank form was able to be opened from the template which worked fine, but when trying to design the same tempate the "InfoPath has encountered an error. The operation failed." error was displayed. After pressing ok to the message, InfoPath opens without loading the required form in design mode. The most recent change to the form template was the re-organisation of fields and groups in the form template's main data source. Sections on the form template were also bound to new groups and fields in the data source which I t...