Day 2 begins! Day 1 notes here
https://technonaturalist.net/blog/2011/01/drupal-7-notes-dealing-ghost-fields
https://technonaturalist.net/comment/reply/43/1223 -- Comment from Jen Lampton Nov 2013 Running cron once doesn’t always do the trick. If it doesn’t work the first time, you may need to run cron 10 or 20 times to get the fields to actually be deleted. Its faster to just manually delete the two tables (field_data and field_revision) as well as the two records from field_instance and field_instance_config. Still not resolved as of the latest version of D7.
https://drupal.org/comment/5865292#comment-5865292
- Delete the records from field_config / field_config_instance
the deleted tables are back!
this is fun.
maybe the shitty fix is just that when you check to see if partners exist, you have to actually check and see if the term tid is set. and accept that it just creates empty field_collection_item id's for every single node.