Randomly (it's happened five times now) when I load up mIRC all of the settings I have are gone and the program has reset to the default settings (we're talking fixedsys fonts, color, logs, custom aliases, everything). As you can imagine this is super frustrating.

I searched the forum and found a similar topic posted a long time ago and the suggested fix was to reset the .ini files to the previous version but when I tried that there were no previous versions to reset to.

Why is this happening? How can I prevent this from happening again? How can I fix this?

I've also had this happen to me multiple times.

After you reset the various options, make a copy of the Ini file, and store them in a different folder than the mIRC one (or even on a different drive). You might want to make a copy of ALL of the INI files.