New problem that cropped up today.  On a SharePoint 2010 site, the Base Title field was modified with the intention of making it not required on the contacts list.  Now this should have been done on the content type, or list level, but as is possible to do, the site column itself was modified.  (Note I’ll use FieldRef and SPFieldLink interchangeably in this post as I’m pretty sure the CAML schema and OM both refer to the same data)

Fallout:  the toot title column is now unghosted and what we’re seeing is that the Title attribute for the root column is now showing up for all inherited fields.  Even those with a different DisplayName in their FieldRef.  Most prominently is the Last Name column on Contact Lists.

We can modify the column on each list to display properly but as soon as a new list is created, its back to “Title”.

I dug in with powershell and the SPFieldLink still specifies that it should read “Last Name” in the DisplayName property.  If I look at the site collection content type it still lists the column as “Last Name”

The only thing I can think of is that the code that renders the List view is improperly just applying the un-ghosted column title if it finds one and ignores the other cases.  Whereas with a ghosted column, it will respect the FieldRef’s DisplayName.

I don’t have a solution yet, but I’m seeing if this occurs in MOSS as well.  Until then do not modify out of the box root site columns!

Edit: Confirmed similar behavior in MOSS/WSS 3.0

*Update
I ended up having to contact Microsoft premium support on this one, and given the nature of licensing, support models, etc I’m not sure if I can publish the fix. That said, they have a quick solution that involves some of the out of the box features so please, if you have this issue and a support contract with them, open a ticket.