From looking at the script, it appears the scores are saved as global variables with names like %FF.score.nick where the 'nick' is replaced with the actual nick. So if someone changes their nick the score starts at zero.

This kind of problem can happen when files are being written-to when the computer crashes, which often results in a zero-size file. You can see your list of variables by clicking on the 'variables' tab once you're in the Alt+R script editor. The default location is a file named 'vars.ini' located in the 'scripts' folder beneath the one where mirc.ini is located.

Unfortunately, mIRC doesn't make a practice of making regular backups of its own .ini files, so if something happens to mirc.ini vars.ini etc, there's no recovery from it.

There may be a backup that was made during an install if you install new updated versions into the same mIRC folder. This next command can be pasted into your 'status window', and will show you if there are any variables files that may have been during a backup:

//echo -a $findfile($mircdir,var*.ini;var*.bak,0,echo -a $asctime($file($1-).mtime) size $file($1-).size $1-)

Hopefully there's a backup of the file in another subfolder somewhere, having a recent enough timestamp to be of value.

--

Going forward, something you can do to defend against this is to run a script I made a while ago for situations like this.

https://mircscripts.info/?page=project&id=pVcK1

The script will save backups of mirc.ini, and optionally can save backups of the other settings files that mIRC itself writes to. The filenames are saved including the weekday as part of the filename, so if you use mIRC every day, you can end up with a rolling backup from each day of the past week.

By default I only enabled backups of mirc.ini because it's the most likely of the settings files to have this happen to it, due to being the one most frequently written to. But the script has comment lines in it to show you how to enable saving backups of the other settings files. In your case, there's a comment on line 98 telling that line 99 is the command to make backups of the vars.ini variables, file, and you can enable that by removing the semi-colon from the front.

It's not just having your settings files trashed by a computer crash that these backups are for. Sometimes you can make a configuration change that you either can't figure out how you did it, or how to undo it, or it's too much work to restore things the way you like them. For example, if you accidentally click on the 'cascade' or 'tile' icon, it can be hard to undo that. So, you can use a backup of mirc.ini from the past week to get things back to the way they were before. With a week's worth of backups, then hopefully there'd be at least one of them that's 'good'.

Note that to restore a backup you may need to copy the backup on top of the 'correct' filename while mIRC is not running, because some of the settings files are simply writing the internal settings to disk, and mIRC may ignore your swap and just write on top of it.