While attempting to publish an Infopath form to a Sharepoint site collection, I came across the following error:

"The following URL is invalid: http://{the-url}"

This had me stumped for a couple of hours, digging around Central Admin messing with security settings etc. Finally I googled the problem and found nothing of particular use untill I came across this post by fellow WordPresser Marcello Tonarelli.

Turns out that to publish in Infopath you need a site at the root of the webapplication containing the site collection you’re publishing to….which someone here deleted without mentioning it 😦