When working in ArcMap, one would encounter all kinds of wired-ass problems for all kinds of unknown reasons. One of them is when you are working on a map document for a while, and out of the blue, unable to open the attribute table of a layer or layers in the document.

The error usually occurs when you right click on a layer and click “Open attribute table”. Instead of showing the attribute table, ArcMap displays you the following message and an empty attribute table. The strange thing is you still can select the rows in the attribute table and you can see how many rows in the table as well. It is just that all the rows are now empty.

There are a few ways to solve this problem. One easy way, which worked for me, is to export out the problematic layer to a new geodatabase and then import it back to your map document. I hope this is helpful to those who encounters similar problem using ArcMap.