Hi EYG,

I've never seen the pages full of CRs but the three little boxes do occur regularly, and they do cause crashes. Another handy tip: do your editing in Gnome, save, re-open the saved file in Notepad, kill off garbage, resave, OPEN A NEW GNOME editor (leave the first one OPEN) and reload the file. If you have fatal garbage in the file, or if deleting it affected the format, the second editor won't load it, but you still have a copy open. There's a few times I've closed Gnome and wished I hadn't as I was unable to reopen the file, meaning I've had to go back to a too-old backup and re-edit recent changes....

The sort of "garbage" I most often see is a short section of an entry from further up the file tagged on at the end. This is usually separated by a blank line from the last visible characters of the real data. But as Caravel warned the tabs are very important, and the real data can have trailing tabs, so don't delete everything back to the last visible character of real data, only to the first visible character of garbage. Since following this rule I've had far fewer problems!

If in doubt, take a look at the end of a default prod file using Notepad, and highlight the end of the data to the end of the file -- you should see a section of "blank" data highlighted.