We don't need no stinkin Task Outcomes!

Ah, au contraire, yes you do.  I had one of those SharePoint WTF challenges today.  I'm building out a SharePoint Designer workflow against a custom list in a custom web template.  I know what you're thinking, and I thought the same, but it wasn't the case!

What was going on was, in my workflow, I have a standard approval task.  Clicking on the task in Designer opens the page where I can modify the properties of the task, like its name, allow reassignment, that sort of thing.  It's also the page where I can define the outcomes of the task - Approved, Rejected, or custom items like Wait Til Next Year or In Your Dreams for those vacation request denials.

Problem is, when I open the page, there were no task outcomes defined...and worse, when I clicked the "New.." button or "New Outcome" on the ribbon, nothing happened, nada:

Not pretty, is it?  I did verify the same workflow worked fine with an OOTB site definition, so my first approach was to look at the web template definition and list definition, and yeah there were a few things wrong...but that didn't fix this issue.  Redeployed the web template, IISRESETted, rebooted, still No Task Outcomes.

The Solution
I've decided to make the solutions succinct and clearly findable - so you Dear Reader can skip all of the fluff above and get your workflow deployed so you can get home and relax.

Go to Site Settings and in Site Collection Features, deactivate all workflow related features; then go back and re-active those feature. 

Worked for me twice, the third side I had really screwed up and got an error that a list "wfpub" in my web was already created so I couldn't activate the workflow features again, so it goes.

Have a slice for me!