[mgj32]

Hi Sherry,
You don't give yourself enough credit. Recover, set 2/2, has worked without a hitch on files of up to over 3.5MB, and saved me a lot of re-construction on several occasions. (Maybe there is some benefit to having 4GB of memory.) I never have any other program running, other than Thunderbird when I am using Composer. I do run a thorough virus/malware/anti root kit scan every day, but that's while I'm sleeping.

I don't know what caused Composer to give me the message that a file I had just been working on and closed was in an unrecognized format and advised upgrading to the latest version, when I tried to re-open it a few moments later. (BTW, this file did not show up in Recover.) Probably something got corrupted in the file. It's said that rebooting can solve a lot of problems, but in this case gave me the 13KB mididev.cfg, which may be the strangest thing of all, almost as if the simple reboot reinstalled that single file.

Instead of deleting that new mididev.cfg and copying the mididev.cfg I had backed up the day before (I back up the whole Notation directory and all sub-directories daily), I probably should have set the Recover options, made it mididev.bac and only then copied the file from the day before.

I don't know what will happen if I re-install--that is, whether the fresh installation will accept the current mididev.cfg, or not. But I really want to avoid re-typing what is on the sound card. So until I get a few just in case hours, I'll just manually save every few minutes, maybe to a "work" directory with a slightly different title each time, so I will be able to see the time of each save.

This may be one of those things that can happen that can never be explained. I heard confirmed, what I had been told before, on a Science Channel program on cosmic rays--that they affect computers every day.

all best,
mgj