the situation: A client did a clean house with my help, all the appropriate steps were taken, Make a backup, recontruct,purge any old documents, rebuild committed. then we cleaned house. in about 2 hours he noticed that aprox, half of his website dissapeared. after alot of testing restoring his inventory prior to the clean house made the whole catalog reappear.
I tested more and found out that if I deleted a specific item it would delete the entire style from the web. I worked with our tech Ken, and he was able to take that a step further. If we add item sid to the style view in the catalog, it will show 1 item sid. if you clean house on that item it will remove the entire style from the web. you may safely clean house on any other item in the style and it will not remove the entire style just that selected item as it should. the problem here is that the while style is "keyed" off of "master" item. if that item gets cleaned house on other items that should remain on the website also get cleaned off. resulting in what happened to our client half of his inventory off of the website disappeared.
So the end result is you can only clean house on items that NONE of them are left on the website. If you deleted the wrong one, or as I referred to it above as the “master” item. the whole thing will be deleted.