All of a sudden today all of our templates disappeared from the settings section of our web site. I found that they were all still there in the masterpages folder on the filesystem. Then I went to the database and I ran the following query to make sure they looked ok:

select * 
from UmbracoNode n 
left join cmsTemplate t on t.nodeid = n.id
where n.nodeObjectType = '6FBDE604-4178-42CE-A10B-8A2600A2F07D'

I noticed there was a template with a name containing an asterisk. I renamed it in the database in both the UmbracoNode and cmsTemplate tables to something that would be file system friendly, and the next reload of my Templates document tree worked, revealing all of my templates.

So I just wanted to pass this along in case someone else falls into this hole.