Manoj Nair | Microsoft 365 Architecture & Automation

I was working on a List workflow the other day in SharePoint Designer 2010. This list already had a workflow which was working perfectly fine and I needed another manual workflow in it. No matter what I tried the workflow would fail and would log a message in the history list that Workflow failed to start and it was cancelled by System Account . I observed that the same happened with new workflows in that list, new workflows in other lists and I even tried creating new subsites and workflows were behaving the same way. I googled for a while and there were many suggestions to clear SPD cache which did not help me. I played with SPD 2010 for a while and observed that the workflow xml and xoml files were checked out. I read in some blogs that this could cause this issue as well. I tried to check those files in but then I was greeted with a new error! " Cannot perform this operation. The file is no longer checked out or has been deleted ." I had no clue what was happening...