I should have posted this a bit earlier in the week, but I've waited until I have been able to account for the problem and make the proper correction. Some of you may have picked up from other sources that there is a somewhat serious problem within WinREG/2 that has only just come to light. This problem has been present since the initial release of WinREG/2 so if you're hoping to avoid the problem by not upgrading - you won't!

The problem all boils down to the use of the brace characters { and }. These are not the sort of characters that you'd normally expect to come across in transcribing old PRs . But they are the sort of characters to be found on your keyboards. These characters are, in their normal use, special formatting characters for VB .NET, which is the framework used in the development of the program.

When VB .NET encounters a { in a string of characters, it looks for a matching } and tries to make sure that the characters between the braces conform to a set of rules for format specifiers. If the string doesn't pass these rules, VB .NET causes an exception to occur. WinREG/2 then traps this exception and, due to some sloppy coding on my part, not being able to work out what it should do, gives up doing what it was trying to do. In all cases this occurs when trying to save the data to disk. The end result of this problem is the truncation of your files, along with the perceived loss of records.

I say perceived loss, because so long as you do not terminate the program, your data is all there, in the memory of WinREG/2. To retain all the data, don't do a Jack Jones (the butcher from Warmington On Sea) and panic by exiting from the program. Correct the errors and try saving again. Repeat until all errors have been corrected. As long as the program stays open on the same file, you won't lose anything.

To aid in this recovery, whilst saving the records, the program displays a running count of the number of records written. When the program hits an error, the count will stop at the record before the one that has the error in it.

Sorry about this, but as I said, the problem has only just come to light. We've all been operating with the problem since I first released the program and it can't have hit that many people otherwise I would surely have heard about it before. I do have a fix for the problem and hope to release it in version 2.1.39, before Xmas, in the next week or so.