When I set up a slave site as a template, the master site login and article sharing no longer work. Difficult to make changes since I can't get into the master site.

My database configuration is 1 master site, 1 regular slave, 2 template slaves under the regular slave; no user sharing; and I have article sharing addon.

All articles shared from master site don't work now.

The master site administrator login page shows the master URL, but logs in to one of the template slave backends, not always the same one.

Weird.

If you shared the users between the website, you perhaps have to check that you are using the correct domain name.

If you can not login into the master, try install a test.php with the "echo phpinfo();" to see if you have a "cookie_domain" parameter with a specific value.
If you have "novalue", the problem is not there.
If you have a specific "domain name value", only this domain can login.

If "novalue", check also that you don't have a "live_url" parameter that would redirect to the login of another website.
If "live_url" is empty, the problem is not there.
In this case, verify that you are using the correct login and password value.
Also check the version of Joomla and Jms Multi Sites version.
If you are using a Joomla 1.5.16 or higher, verify that you have correctly fixed the bug present in Joomla concerning the sessions and introduced in Joomla 1.5.16 or higher.
If you are using Joomla 1.6.x, the session is correctly processed. So the problem is not there.

Thanks for the reply. None of these worked.

I just deleted all my template slaves and rebuilt everything as a fresh slave. It's working now. I don't need user sharing so that works for me. Still would be good though if template slaves worked without crashing the master site.