Occasionally, (for reasons unbeknownst to me) you must delete and re-add
an explicit managed path when deleting the site  collection contained
therein. This is especially true if the SQL Server, or some other
connectivity issue, was thrashing during the site collection  deletion
process.

I am assuming you understand the difference between wildcard and
explicit managed paths?

I have deleted  and recreated the managed
path (several times). Apparently, because the path name was already
used, MOSS doesn't recognize that it's *really* available again
(incomplete site  collection deletion?). I have been able to "trick"
MOSS into creating a new site by using a wildcard directory and then
typing in the name (e.g., schools/schoolname where schools/ is
wildcard type). But, then my custom content  types are not available.

I tried using the dbrepair operation, but it finds 0 orphans. MS
Support has suggested creating a new config db and reattaching
everything, but that seems a bit extreme. Isn't there any better way
to clean up the previously deleted site collection? An easy solution
would be to create  a path with a name that has never been used, but
I should have mentioned that I need to keep the URL from the
original site (this is for a public facing website).

Any ideas short of changing the name or going through the process of
creating a new config db, etc.?

1. The managed path is actually stored in the content  DB. So,
worse case scenario is removing the content database that hosted the
site collection  in question.

2. The orphaned managed path object should be in the contentDB,
not the configDB. You could try the stsadm.exe -o preparetomove command.
It will clean up a contentDB.