Hi Marietta, 'Crunched' it so bad, it's little pieces of garblty-gook. Really looks like the files been encrypted. What a mess............Saving Grace is I have a floppy disk backup I made not to long ago. Won't have to re-enter to much. Problem is I 'trashed' some of the original data after I had entered it. X(*&^%$#@ arrrgh. Folks need to be aware of a couple of problems that the 'computer' geeks never tell you about: a. Your computer has at least 2 little fans in them <one in the back by the power supply, and the other on the microprocesser>. After a few years of accumulated 'wear & tear' and dust, these fans may stop functioning. When that happens, your computer overheats and 'cooks' causing all kinds of strange things and 'crashes' to occur. Scrambled data files being the least of the problems. b. After thousands & thousands of file / data 'read & write' cycles, your harddrive is like a potholed filled country road after a thunderstorm. Fragmented files everywhere, eventually leading to the dreaded "This program has caused a fatal error and will be terminated" error message. I never believed this was possible just because of regular useage, but I've 'seen the light'. Only way out is to 'reformat' your harddrive and re-install your software on a regular basis. This is not an easy task, particularly if you don't have a 'backup' drive on which to store your data files. c. Due to really sloppy programming and the lousy Microsoft Windows interface, some programs don't interlace well in a multiplexed Windows environment. They don't like to run similtaneously with other programs and like to 'crash' when under those circumstances. Could be any number of things that causes the problem. On my system, Eudora didn't like to run with Netscape after a while and would 'crash' after reading a few emails. Only fixed the problem after reloading the system drivers. Apparently one of the 'drivers' had become corrupted. Anyway, it's really hard to tell what causes some of the problems & data losses you experience sometimes. Can't always assume it's the particular program software. Many times it can be traced back to a hardware problem. So I'll sit here, re-enter data, and 'bug' the list, ad nauseum, with questions about obscure family members because I lost the data and through the records away. Dave ============================================= At 12:32 AM 7/16/99 -0700, you wrote: >Dave, you mentioned that your FTM lost all your data. So did mine, and I >couldn't >understand WHY ! I'm wondering if this is a common occurence with FTM, and >how >many others may have had the same problem? >