Yes, that much is a given, and I assumed obvious.. ;-)
To clarify tho, what I am saying is that from my observations, there is a relatively much higher incidence with mIRC than any other programs I usually run. That makes me ask "why?" Especially if I'm not doing anything at the time that gives me any reason what-so-ever to think mIRC should even be writing something to disk (other than log files). Actually, unless I click a save toolbar button/select a save file menu item, it almost never happens in any other app, since few write anything to disk without an explicit user action. I had also stated that I've tried to force some crashes/reboots to reproduce it, with no success. At the hardware level, writes happen so fast, that you have to be doing something unusual with the code or the crash happen so randomly that it hits that rare moment in mid-write.
General programming experience tells me such behaviour would indicate I should poke around the code that handles the logic of when/what/where to write, as well as the routines which do the actual writing, and consider if it is doing something "unusual". For example, opening a file, seeking the begining, truncating, writing only a single line, forcing a flush, writing another line, flushing again, etc. Besides being extremely inefficient, it causes a much larger number of actual writes to disk (at the hardware/system level, data is transfered to/from the disk in entire 512-byte sectors or more. The OS doesn't actually write to disk unless flushed, or it has a full buffer of data to transfer, etc. More actual writes just gives more places for problems to creep in), keeps the file open longer (to us humans, 10ms vs 100ms is trivial; but to a computer, it's a very very long time..), and other things which a crash could disrupt.
Normally, I couldn't imagine a programing writing a disk file this way because of the inefficiencies I mentioned.. However, the routines used to write an INI file may very well operate in a similar manner since it may write to different sections/topics and items at different times, causing the write routines to bounce back and forth around the file.
Sorry if my noting the crash issue seemed obvious or stupid--I don't know the mIRC source code, so I can't really tell what info is truly relevant. I can only give all the info I can to help those who do the coding narrow down to where the problem might be.
