Cannot open page in sharepoint designer. SOAP error.

In playing with web parts this week, I managed to destroy a page I was working on. Resetting that page to Site Definition did not do the job.

In sharepoint designer, I was getting the error:
soap:ServerServer was unable to process request. ---> An unexpected error occurred while opening this page. For assistance, contact your site administrator.

To fix, in IE, I appended ?contents=1 to my broken page url.
http://testingsite.copm/sites/Shared%20Documents/statuspage.aspx?contents=1

I was then able to delete the data view web parts I believed were causing the problem.

Now I can open the page again in Sharepoint Designer with no SOAP error.