I am just putting a site together that doesn't require any rss or atom feeds. I turned these off in the blog settings and all was well. When I came to add the sites sitemap to google webmaster (via the _sitemap tempskin) I realised that I couldn't access it and it returned a 404. Turn the feeds back on and you can access the sitemap skin just fine.

2.4.7 doesn't display the same problem as it looks like a check has been made a lot earlier in the 3.whatever code rather than just in the individual skin files:

if( $Skin->type == 'feed' )
	{	// Check if we actually allow the display of the feed; last chance to revert to 404 displayed in default skin.
		// Note: Skins with the type "feed" can always be accessed, even when they're not installed.
		if( $Blog->get_setting('feed_content') == 'none' )
		{ // We don't want to provide feeds; revert to 404!
			unset( $skin );
			unset( $Skin );
			$disp = '404';
			$disp_detail = '404-feeds-disabled';
		}
	}

Not sure what the best approach is here but it seems like we need a separate skin type so we can split out the feeds from the other xml types - normal, feed, xml? (I know feeds are xml as well but I couldn't think of a better name :D )

L