Render template file for view if no result? I need to render a view's template file even if there are no results for the view.  Is this possible out of the box?  If not, any idea on how to hack it?
Even though there is no results to display, views will call the appropriate theme functions and template files to render other information.

For example, If you go to views-view.tpl.php file you could see that views is rendering lot of information conditionally. For example if you have some exposed filters and there is no result for the execution, still view will call this template file to render the exposed form

If you specified No Results Behavior or exposed some filters you can check this.

Below is the sample code on how the views is rendering conditionally,

&lt;?php if ($rows): ?&gt;
    &lt;div class="view-content"&gt;
      &lt;?php print $rows; ?&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;?php elseif ($empty): ?&gt;
    &lt;div class="view-empty"&gt;
      &lt;?php print $empty; ?&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;
  &lt;?php endif; ?&gt;


If there's nothing to render it will skip all the conditions and will not render anything.

If you want to override the way views is rendering the output, then you can create your own template for your view and place it in your theme directory. Template name should be something like this - views-view--.tpl.php