The "Favorites" has regularly lost my lists of symbols every few months for the past several years. Even with only a few dozen symbols, now my FAVORITES.DTA is over 8 meg in size! It doesn't do any good to keep a copy of the DTA, either, since there is NO WARNING when it has become corrupted. According to Tech Support, there's no utility to fix/cleanup, either. PULL THE PLUG on this [censored]ized, [censored]-poor crappy-coded custom file system, which Equis calls "Favorites" --time to use a NORMAL DIRECTORY FOLDER instead. See http://forum.equis.com/viewtopic.php?p=17490#17490 for more detail. --Johnathan

Interesting. A crash would make sense, but clicking the "X", double-clicking top-left icon or ALT-F4 should all flow through the same as File|Exit (I'm a former programmer/developer). If the "Favorites" list was kept as a normal directory & file, the most you would lose is the latest entry, and that only if the crash occurred at the moment of writing the directory entry. This is poorly implemented, there was no good reason to create it, and certainly none to keep a whole 'nother custom file system, when the OS already has one. The simple solution is to write it off and give the job to the OS, where it belongs. I've mentioned this several times to tech support, both by phone and email, over the past few years. Either someone's ego is involved, or they don't get enough complaints to address the problem. Equis does have problems with the basics; another example is "Equidistant Channels" -- try drawing one, and check the "Distance" parameter. If it is anything other than a whole number, after you close & re-open the chart, it will drop anything after the decimal point. This feature is USELESS. How it could get to version 9 is beyond me. They must be taking lessons in quality control from Bill Gates. --Johnathan

Can't tell about abnormal termination -- when FAVORITES goes to lunch, there's no warning. It could be after a Metastock crash, or show up several sessions later. The DBMS would me a mistake -- likely to lead to the same sort of problems as present. For all I know, they're using it now. Using the file & folders has the natural advantage of being simple -- which is probably why Microsoft choose it for the Internet Explorer Favorites. --Johnathan

Well, I do wish it had an auto-sort, rather than have to right-click everything, then sort. Anyway, if MS didn't re-invent the wheel, why should Equis?