Weird glitches with Sigil V2.7 and later

[BeckyEbook]

No, no... Plugin is only for manage meta entries that use the name and content attributes. I don't even touch BookId.

[BeckyEbook]

Plugin EditMetaInEPUB3 released here.

[Marg1780]

So on my husband's (retired IT guy) suggestion for order of testing, I excluded Sigil from the antivirus, and am going to let that perculate for a bit before trying for a full re-install of Sigil. While showing him the issue, I did find another interesting oddity. I got clip bar back to normal by reimporting data from an earlier export, then saw its contents vanish again. But it turns out that even though the clips bar is now blank, if I open the clips subwindow, that looks and works as normal, and the ini file itself is as I've set it up. Flipping the "view clips bar" function off and on again has no effect... Weird.

[Marg1780]

Okay, so I
1) Did a full uninstall/reinstall.
2) put both the Sigil data folder and the Sigil task folder into the anti-virus bypass list.
3) re-entered all my clips manually to avoid any cross-contamination from copy/pasting from the saved copy.

I have made zero changes to the clips since then, and have been using Sigil as normal.

So far, the clips have behaved themselves - a great relief - but
1) the clips bar still turns itself off intermittently
2) the "All HTML Files" option in the search subwindow occasionally switches over to "Current File". (Always that selection even though there are a number of other choices available.) I use that option extremely rarely, and haven't used it at all since I started this thread.

I've seen that "now and then" behavior pop up a couple of other places in the user interface. When I first upgraded, I tried out each of the choices for the icon set. My eyesight isn't good, and they were all worse for me than the set from the older versions, but I settled on the one that seemed most usable, which was not the default. It ran for a few days, then switched itself back to the default. After a few rounds, I've simply learned to live with the default.

I never saw this behavior until I jumped forward to the release that was current last spring. Wherever their "last saved" values are loaded from, it's in an .ini file that I have never altered directly, as far back as I've used the app. The clips ini file is the only one I've ever modified outside of the user interface. The pattern suggests that the reading of some "last set" values is occasionally failing at load time. Could be related to Windows 11, but I've no way of doing a regression test.

[BeckyEbook]

I have a different theory.
If there’s a sigil.ini file in the configuration folder, then even if you delete the "new" main configuration file (sigil_v6.ini), a new file will be created based on the old one.

So if you’re starting fresh:
a) close Sigil,
b) delete or move the sigil.ini AND sigil_v6.ini files somewhere else,
c) launch Sigil, set your preferred settings, and check if everything is OK when you restart it.

[KevinH]

And if that doesn't work, my guess is you have some antivirus/defender software interfering with Sigil reading its ini file.

So are you absolutely sure you have told your antivirus or defender software to ignore not just the Sigil program directory but to also fully exclude the Sigil Preferences folder from their scanning?

You do not keep your Sigil Preferences folder on a network or cloud drive do you?

If that is not it, I would look for a rogue system extension that is causingproblems. You could try rebooting into safe mode and see if that prevents the loss of ini settings values.

Sigil users on Windows are our single biggest group of users. If such a problem was prevalent on other Windows users we would surely have heard about it.