SuperMemo deletes the text of a topic upon creating a cloze deletion

Question

From: Supermemo User
Sent: Mar 28 2007 15:39
Subject: URGENT: Supermemo 2006 is deleting my collection!

I'm having a bit of a (huge!) problem with SM 2006- it is deleting parts of my collection. This occurs when I create cloze question while doing incremental reading.

I get a message along the lines of 'Access Denied: Deleting..' (or something similar- I don't want to try to re-produce the message!). At that point, the text contained in the topic is deleted.

Now, based on the 'access denied' error message and the fact that this has not happened before, I have a theory that this may be occuring as a result of my transfering my collection to another PC, and more importantly the fact that I zipped my collection to reduce its size for transfer.

The collection unzipped succcessfully on my new PC, and everything seeeeemed okay until I got the error message. Now, I examined the properties of my SM collection folder (right click on folder, then properties) and the 'Read-only' check box is shaded, which *I think* indicates that some of the files within the folder have the 'Read-only' attribute set.

I also read on the web somewhere that Microsoft zip will erroneously set the 'Read-only' attribute on some files.

So, big question-- should the 'Read-only' attribute be set on my SM collection folder (I am, unfortunately, unable to check the state on my other PC right now)??? Or is my theory that Microsoft zip has erroneously set the 'Read-only' attribute on some files in the collection and this is causing my error correct??

Here’s the error message that occurs when I attempt to create cloze questions from some (not all) topics when incrementally reading

When I click ‘OK’ in the error message dialog box (see above), Supermemo deletes all the text in the topic as shown in the picture

Not sure if it is relevant or not, but here are the folder attributes on the folder that contains my Supermemo collection

Remarks

From mahabharatta:

This sounds exactly like something that was happening to me in sm2004

on pressing Alt-Z sometimes the original (topic) element would lose all text.

Some other times, on pressing Alt-Z sometimes I would get several error messages, and the element (not topic) would come up with blank Question and Answer elements. (I'm working from memory - I have not done much incremental reading recently).

I never found a solution, just lived with it.

Though not mentioned above, mahabharatta also told me that he had encountered this issue on an AMD Athlon CPU based system, and I also only encountered it on an Athlon system. He mentioned that he had not encountered the issue when using a Pentium CPU based system, and the same is true for me - only when using Supermemo on an Athlon system does the issue arise. I don't have an explanation as to why this might be the case (it may even be a coincidence), but it is interesting to note nonetheless.

Processors should have no effect. It is the access to the file system. Something blocks supermemo files

When the originating element's text disappeared, I could copy the text from the cloze element back (and take out the big [...] ).

And if the Q and A element came out screwy, I could always re-generate it.

Fortunately I never lost all the text in the source (topic) element AND lost the Q and A, so I could always replace one with the other.

Answer

You cannot use SuperMemo if your collections are locked or read-only!!! See also: Interference_with_MSN_Desktop_Search Until you find the reason for locked collections, your all learning investment can be lost at any time!

For fast searching, allow Indexing Service to index this folder is not likely to be useful and may result in interference with SuperMemo (tested in Windows XP, it was not possible to produce the said errors though)