First, I apologize for the long post but I tough it would be useful to others.
I too, have experienced a nice blue-screen of death today on my laptop that uses Win 7. Really, it's been mostly a year that I now run on this OS and it's the very first time I got such an issue. Unfortunately, UE did not like the crash an like you, I lost all configuration settings.
I also found the hard way that the only option from my perspective is to restore these corrupted setting by restoring the files. These are my own findings so there may well be other possibilities that I haven't found.
I see 2 possibilities to this issue but I may well be wrong :
- Either my Windows user account kinda got reset in the recovery by Win 7 and some magical registry keys or ID numbers changed in the process which UE detected as a new user and completely recreated a new set of configuration files. Please don't hit on me if this sounds funny. This is pure speculation and I'm no MS expert.
- Or, the configuration files were really corrupted and UE did it's best to make it work.
My perception of those 2 possible issues :
- Why don't UE integrate an automated profile/settings/menus/etc... backup process? It could well be in the form of the upgrade backup process in the same directory where the configuration files are located by default. Similar to these : "wordfiles Saved [09.15.10]" folders and files that gets created when you upgrade. Simply creating a similar properly named and dated folder at regular intervals or event triggered like every time you close the application, keeping x backward copies of it and rotating them. Of course, all those settings could well be configurable trough the Advanced - Configuration menu. Really that would be a nice to have feature and no more lost settings...
Anyways, here's how I restored mine :
After Googleling around for about an hour, I kinda had an interesting idea of looking at my backups... Well, figure it out... I've never backed up any of my Windows systems !!!
Well, that may not be totally true if you are using Windows 7 like I do.
How happy was I when I "accidentally" landed on a MS page explaining how easy it is to restore a file from a restore point in Win 7 !!!
Of course you require that restore points be activated on your system for that functionality to work.
After that, it's just a matter of right clicking the existing original folder or file and selecting "Restore previous versions" in the context menu.
I have chosen to completely overwrite my %APPDATA%/IDMComp/UltraEdit folder since it was only a couple of days old.
Thanks to MS auto function that creates a restore point every time you update Windows
From here, all settings were back and I'm happy again !
All is well for me now but what about previous Windows versions??
My curiosity kept me going and I found this free little utility that seems to make it also possible on all version of Vista. I haven't tested it my self so just follow the link and find it out
http://www.shadowexplorer.com/
Unfortunately, I haven't found any procedure or similar tool for Win XP.
Robert.