Attempting to open a layout file and it gives me a generic error upon opening. Tried to open the backup file and got the same message. I made a duplicate and dug into it after seeing elsewhere on this forum about changing the filetype to zip to access contents but when doing so it says the folder is empty. Need help 
Nardone Residence.layout (10.6 MB)
To do the trick of unzipping and re-zipping the contents, and rename to be .layout, requires that the expanding of the initial zip worked ok. In your file’s case one item in the file is corrupt, and so the whole unzipping fails.
Solution to that is to use a smarter app for unzipping, so that it can skip the parts that are corrupt. 7-zip might be able to do that.
I went ahead and unzipped all the parts that were good, and re-zipped what I got, to make this LayOut file:
Nardone.layout (10.7 MB)
That should open for you, and it will be missing an element from the document. Hopefully it won’t be something that is important!
Goated. Everything looks up to date from yesterdays work. Thanks Colin!
-Jaron