Usenet Explorer

Today I ran UE only to see the box asking if I wanted to rollback the settings, etc. saying no groups were associated (or words to that effect). I aborted, wanting to check out the log file in case last time I used it, UE had crashed. However, running UE again had written a login message to it anyway. The last time I used it, I had put the scheduler to download after I'd left the house with Finish & Exit selected. There had been no crash that I was aware of. All I've done since the last UE run and this one was to reboot a couple of times. I'll chkdsk it to make sure but nothing else seems problematic.

I would, though, like to see date and time stamps in the log file. It gets less easy to check for the last time a crash occurred or a missed logout message appeared, which sometimes happens if UE crashes without logging it. Every time you run UE you have more chance of losing where you were in the log. It might be useful to be able to count the number of times since a missed logout to try to trace back when the problem first occurred. A date/time stamp would make this easier.

I'll try to pin down why reg.dat was corrupt in the first place but, as I say, nothing unusual has happened since the last time I ran UE. No system crashes or unusual activity. The last UE crash I had I would have posted here and it was so long ago I can't remember when. UE has run without problems for many months.

On every start UE makes integrity check on reg.dat to ensure it is not corrupted.

UE ensures the reg.dat is written on the hard drive and is flushed to disk (maximum an application can do to tell the system the file must be committed to the hard drive asap), but the system doesn't necessarily commit the writes immediately.

Also other utilities (third party defragmenters, antivirueses I don't know what else) maybe to blame since the probability of any system stop is too small.

So I added automatic settings rollback if the integrity check fails.

In the end you didn't lose newsgroups/servers with the revert option?

Chkdsk reported nothing, I rolled back the settings (after first exiting and RARing up the entire settings directory). Everything seems fine again except for maybe a setting or two was different. The only settings I think I've changed recently were the times in the scheduler so I'm easily back up to speed.

All is well again but I wonder how it could have happened. UE was scheduled to start downloading, finish & exit and the system was running for maybe a day afterwards until the next time I used UE. This leaves plenty of time for anything necessary to be flushed. My AV has not changed (except for def updates), my defragger is scheduled to run early mornings (UE ran in mid morning, well after the defrag had finished). Also, in my AV I've set the UE directory as excluded and Event Manager reports nothing applicable around the time this happened.

For now, I have nothing to go on.