[Renaldo]

I believe it's an xml file too.

FWIW, I used to have this problem also. It happened about 3-4 times and was really annoying. I changed a few things and it's never happened again. No idea which of the things I did stopped it, and I basically did all of it in a span of two days. Here are the changes I made:

1. Got rid of the cheap PNY 2gb SD card I had. It was dirt cheap when I bought it, and slow as molasses. Put in a Lexington 4gb high speed memory stick instead.

2. Uninstalled Sony software, all the way down to removing it from Windows Registry and following the manual complete uninstall directions Sony has. Then reinstalled it.

3. Began using Calibre for my transfers and management, including creating the collections in it using Tags; and just using the Sony software for things I have to use it for, like free things I've downloaded from Sony.

Since doing this, I've found two main differences. 1) Collections no longer go away. 2) After unplugging the reader from my computer indexing time has gone from 15-20 minutes down to 2-3 minutes.

If I had to guess, I'd say that the cheap, slow SD card was underperforming so much that it was crashing the xml file and the Sony software becasue I'd have all kinds of lock up issues when using it, and with the new card there's none of that.