Project file appears corrupt

[ddoyle]

I am working on a project file, using version Professional 2002. This
morning when I opened the file many of the task names are missing and
have unrecognizable symbols. This appears as a task name near where the
trouble starts:


asOpen
DoNotAllowOpenOfAlreadyOpenFile


I do have other project files linked into this one as predecessor and
successor links.
I am also including another project file as a sub-project in this file.

I have seen this before and have always started over from the last good
backup. But,
I'd like to know what's causing this so that I can prevent it in the
future if possible. I've
shutdown project, restarted my PC, but it didn't help.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
ddoyle.

 

[Rick Roszko]

Other than "Notes" and "Resource Names"
do not exceed the 255 charater count.

I have seen "tasks" that are huge...

Also, don't cut and paste from other docs
such as Excel or whatever; especially
IFF (as in if and only if) the file was
generated by an automated process
(such a mainframe program spewing a data file)
because they have hidden/invisible control characters
including, but not limited to CR/LF and Ctrl-1
through Ctrl-15.

Also, don't use any "commas". When a line becomes corrupt
a comma can do nasty things --- " and ' are bad too. And I
keep away from ampersands "&"... Type it out as "and".

As long as there is no line corruption, you can use these, but
when you get a line corruption, these symbols start a cascading
error as you have noticed...

 

[ddoyle]

If I isolate the file in a place where it cannot access the external
files (that contain the predecessor/successor links), it
opens fine, with the exception of complaining that it cannot find the
files for the external links. So, it looks like
my file is not corrupt, but one of the others is, or there is a stale
file handle or something wierd. All of the
files are resident on a Solaris machine and accessed through Samba on
my PC. Next step, start change access permissions
on the external files to prevent reading one at a time to find the
culprit.