CRM 2011: Cannot Export Solutions

We were experiencing an issue in one of our CRM 2011 upgrade environment where the Export Solution function was not working. We would go through the wizard export process but after clicking on the final export step nothing happened. There is always a little delay between clicking the final Export button and the prompt asking you whether you want to open or save the solution zip file but in this case the prompt never happened. It also did not matter what we attempted to export - creating a solution with just one entity or web resource etc. still did not allow for this function to work so there did not seem to be a way to isolate the issue.

We were seeing an exception in the Event Log as shown below but this did not reveal anything significant. This issue was not caused by plugins since we only had the system plugins in the environment.

Running a trace using the diagnostics tool while reproducing the issue similarly did not produce anything  particularly useful.

So we turned to Microsoft Support to help us with troubleshooting this issue. After a lot of back and forth and having them escalate the issue to their dev team, the issue was finally nailed down to something quite simple. There were some attribute maps on the contact to opportunity mapping (1:N) that seemed to be causing the problem. In our case, the following 2 were identified:

Therefore the resolution was to follow the steps outlined below

1. Go into Settings -> Customizations -> Customize the System
2. Under entities, select the Contact entity
3. Go into 1:N relationships
4. Open the Contact to Contributions relationship for type of Parental relationship
5. Open mappings
6. Delete the 2 accountiddsc and accountidname mappings
7. Save and close
8. Publish all customizations

I am not sure how these errant mappings came into being in the first place. They were present in the original CRM 4.0 environment and came along with the upgrade. But the export issue only affected the CRM 2011 environment. I would suspect that whatever introduced this issue it is probably not limited to just the contact to opportunity mapping. Therefore if you are encountering this error and you do not find a similar mapping issue in the contact to opportunity that you look for other entity mapping containing the "*iddsc" field mappings - that will be the smoking gun...