My component.php override is highly modified and errors occur when editing or adding K2 items in the frontend.

Where can I hack the files to make it use the default site template?

The best I have achieved is to get it to open in a new window instead of the iframe modal but it is still using tmpl=component and though I removed every instance of the query, it is still returning the component template.

Hello mcradio,

Why don'you try with the system's template component.php?

You can do this by simply adding &template=system at the end of your URLs.