Symptoms:

• InfoPath form with ~150 data elements
• About 60 of the elements need to be attached to the SharePoint library
• We were promoting the columns to the library, and on publishing ran into failures about 90% of the time

Our best hypothesis is that the web service on the SharePoint server was timing out before the publish operation could complete. However, once we changed the way we’re publishing the problem seems to have gone away completely. The fix is to ensure all of the “linked” columns already exist in the form library, then tell InfoPath to attach to those columns, not create new ones. You can do this during the publish wizard process:

1. Click the File -> Publish… menu option
2. Select the first option “To a SharePoint server…”
3. On the next screen include the proper URL to the library
4. On the third screen select “Document Library”
5. On the fourth screen select “Update the form template in an existing library” and choose the library from the list
6. On the fifth screen you’ll have the option to add your columns. When you click the “Add” button, instead of opting to have InfoPath create the column for you (i.e. the “None: Creat the new column…” option), select the “This document library” option from the first drop-down, then select the appropriate column name from the second drop-down box

This seems to have completely corrected the “Updating content type failed” error we were having and appears to have cleared up several other issues. When our publish failed, we were losing all of the views, etc. which makes sense, as InfoPath was re-creating the columns. We were also seeing fields become un-linked in the SP Designer workflow. Presumably this will fix all of the issues and save us an incredible amount of time moving forward. Hopefully this tip helps you, and please leave comments for others if you can add any insight.