I just checked the site for updates to the timing software, the next version is pre-release, look what I found in the release notes:
- Potential Program Lockups - the software could exhibit an infinite wait state (deadlock) and possibly corrupt the staging file in extreme cases. These problems were reproduced only under very high stress loads that should not be seen in normal use. The reproducibility of these issues depends heavily the circumstances and amount of load that the software is managing. It also seems dependent on the speed of your CPU since that affects the multi-process nature of Windows. 2 potential concerns were found:
- If the Auto-Save Interval was executed in very short intervals, timing occurred VERY rapidly (seconds apart), and if data entry was occurring at the same time. Hard case to reproduce in normal circumstances
- Movement keys are continually pressed while timing is occurring very rapidly (with a few seconds with multiple timers running).
The solution was to improve and isolate the save processes from other running processes, and thus saving after each car in the staging grid works as expected. This is still not recommended since it will thrash the processor excessively, especially for very large events. Slow machines will see this impact.
It looks like we aren't the only ones who lost data with his crappy software!