OpenOffice documents full of hash marks

DVBQQ

I use OOo 3.1.0, Zotero 1.0.10 and Firefox 3.0.11 with the Vista operating system.

Today when I tried opening chapters of my PhD thesis I was shown a box for ASCII Filter Options: Character set, Default fonts, Language and Paragraph break. (This has never happened before). I hit OK, the document opened, and was simply screen after screen of ##############, and nothing else. This only happens with documents using Zotero.
I have tried deleting and reinstalling the OOo plugin. No difference.

It worked yesterday. It doesn't work today. I have to finish and submit my thesis in one month.
Help, please.

noksagt

The document is corrupt and probably cannot be fixed (it is likely filled with 0s). Do you save it to an external or networked drive or have anything else that may cause it to save slowly?

Restore from a backup.

Here is where auto-backups are stored (if you enabled that feature):
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=74&t=12426

DVBQQ

Thank you for such a quick reply.

After posting my scream for help I remembered I'd copied all the relevant files to a data stick. I've just copied them back to my PC, and (thank the gods) they all work.

Can you think of any reason why these documents became corrupted? It only happened to the files containing Zotero citations. (However, I've found OOo 3.1 to be far less stable than the previous version 2.4.)

What this teaches me is the vital importance of backing up my files...

noksagt

I don't know why zotero files, alone would be problematic. Could you have had all problematic files open at the same time? Or used them on a computer that you didn't use the working files with?

There are several posts in the OO.o forums on this. Some corruption can be traced to slow writes (indicated above) or hibernation/loss of power. Word DOCs seem to be more problematic that OpenDocument format.

This is likely an OO.o issue & you may receive better support from them. If (however unlikely) Zotero exacerbated corruption, we'd still want to fix it. If you are able to reliably corrupt documents in a way that is attributable to Zotero, please share the procedure.

DVBQQ

Thanks, noksagt. I only use the one computer, but yes, I may have had most, though probably not all of the files open at the same time.

The only response I had on the OOo forum, by the way, was that my system was probably screwed up, and that I really should use A-V and anti-spyware programs; I pointed out that I use these every day. In general (with some exceptions) I've found the OOo forum less than helpful, compared to the Firefox and Thunderbird forums -- and now, of course, this forum.

Thanks for your offer to examine the problem, but I'm afraid I don't plan to try to reliably corrupt my documents again -- sorry to disappoint you!