From SuperMemopedia

Question

I have a Supermemo collection of about 3000 Japanese kanjis. I painstakingly added each one, with the kanji on the question part and the meaning/reading/mnemonic on the answer part. Today something extremely strange happened. My computer rebooted itself while I was working on the collection (Blue Screen Of Death).

I opened my collection to continue, and ALL the questions of the collection (ie. all the kanjis) disappeared. The answers are intact, but the question field is simply blank.

Thinking about hardware corruption (it happened before), I restored my collection using a recent backup. Same identical problem. The kanjis are perfectly visible in the Element Browser but SuperMemo doesn't display correctly as normal items.

The fact that makes me crazy is that I checked the HTML files and they are still intact. There is no apparent corruption. If I open them using Internet Explorer they are displayed blank just like in Supermemo. BUT if I open them in Firefox they show correctly!

If I try to edit the Question field and paste the kanji again it simply doesn't work. The cursor becomes extremely tiny and it is impossible to write anything.

Is it possible that SuperMemo may have tampered with some component of Internet Explorer? I know it's a long shot, but I didn't even touch it. I use Firefox all the time. I am going to reinstall Windows to see if that changes anything. If that doesn't work, any suggestion before I shot myself?

Hints

If your SuperMemo files display ok in Firefox, they are definitely ok. If they do not display in IE, there is a definite problem with IE (SuperMemo uses IE and will have similar problems). If you had a blue screen of death, you need to check for spyware, malware, viruses, trojans and the lot. Once you repair (or reinstall) Internet Explorer, there is a good chance you will get your collection back ok. For security, be sure you back up before all operations to make sure your PC/system problems do not kill your files for good.

Reply

I reinstalled Windows and everything is fine now. Still, what happened remains a mystery to me. I renew my suggestion to make SuperMemo less dependent on Internet Explorer in future versions.