On my blog, I’ve recently posted an article on how to solve many of these problems by first identifying them precisely using either the log file of WLW and/or an HTML traffic capturing tool such as Fiddler. Beside the log file and Fiddler, this article also covers in detail some of the most common problems such a the presence of an UTF-8 BOM at the beginning of one of the PHP script files or the presence of extraneous characters at either the beginning (before the opening tag ) of one of those PHP script files.

You can find this article there:

http://coding-paparazzi.sylvainlafontaine.com/2010/02/solving-connection-problems-wlw.html

In the second part (soon to be published), I will cover the problem of the presence of Warning and of Fatal PHP error messages in the XML-RPC response file. Fatal errors are usually the result of some kind of error in the PHP code but you can get a Warning error message simply by having a badly set php.ini file; so it’s often simply a local configuration problem of PHP.

1.) deactivated all plugins (no change)
2.) removed all trailing/leading spaces from root dir PHP files (no change)

3.) a.) tried a diff theme (issue went away)
b.) removed all trailing/leading spaces from theme files
c.) issue still returned upon going back to my theme)

4.) added line to xmlrpc.php as directed here (no change)
http://www.rotman.be/blog/?p=35

This is driving me nuts… obviously it’s my theme but what else should I be looking for? I’ve removed the leading/trailing spaces!

Thanks in advance,

- Chris

I’ve listed them on http://techtites.com/2009/01/14/fix-the-windows-live-writer-and-wordpress-stripping-tags-issue/ along with a zip file with the fixed WordPress 2.7 files

Did you post your problem in the windows live forum?
http://groups.msn.com/windowslivewriter/home