Netscape custom.dic strangeness

Back in February I opened a thread complaining that my Netscape 7.1's custom dictionary wouldn't learn new words. Somehow an asterisk had gotten to the beginning of that file and blinded NS to it. After removing the *, everything worked fine until recently the problem cropped up again. No asterisk this time, and there's a new special feature. Look at the words here, copied and pasted from custom.dic:

Lyndon
M&M's
M*A*S*H
M-aalo-x
M-abel-
M-acAr-thur
m-achi-negun
M-acWo-rld
M-acy'-s
M-adel-eine
M-adel-ine
m-adeu-p
m-ag
m-ags
M-ahle-r
m-akeb-elieve
M-alib-u
M-amie-
M-andy-
M-arci-a
M-arge-

What would cause that? It continues until M-F (for Monday through Friday). From there on it's OK until it gets to "Villanova," which is the last entry. Nothing after that. No W through Z. That problem was present back in February, too, but it also cleared up after I got rid of the *. Now the problem is back.

I know, I know, NS is outmoded. But I'm used to NS and I'd like to solve this mystery just on general principles. Any ideas?

 

BOBBO,

For some reason, which remains a mystery to me, the file is corrupt again.

First make a backup copy of the file, and then open the file in Notepad. Correct the errors, and add the asterisk as the first character in the file. Then save the file. I believe the asterisk is there by default, but haven't found anything to actually back that up. Still looking tho...

Or you can rename the file to Xcustom.dic, then create a new file, using Notepad, and name it custom.dic. Then copy the "good" files to the newly created file, and make the first character an asterisk. Don't copy the corrupt words tho.

OR if you have a good backup of the file, simply replace the current file with the backup.

Let us know what happens.

 

Ramona: Thanks for replying. As I recall, back in the DOS days an * would have an effect on commands but I'm not sure exactly what. Seems to me it wasn't good. That's why I said it blinded NS back in February so custom.dic wasn't learning new words. I may be wrong about that, tho.

I already have 2 backup copies of custom.dic. One is in my F:\ partition, and the other is in the Microsoft\Proof folder rather than in the Mozilla\* folder. The MS one for some reason doesn't seem to get corrupted. So I'll experiment with them. In the past when I've tried to correct things, I've copied and pasted from the F:\ source straight into the corrupt custom.dic without changing its name and creating a new custom.dic file first. Or I've corrected those strange M entries and added the missing W-Z entries right inside custom.dic. Maybe that was my mistake.

 

BOBBO,

That could very well have been your problem, by copying into a corrupt file. I think making a pristine file, and copying only the non corrupted words is your best bet. I think you must be unique with this problem, as I have yet to find anything on this strange occurrence.

 

Ramona: I changed custom.dic to custom-old.dic (so it would be alphabetically near the new custom.dic file) and wrote a few words in a NS message that formerly wouldn't stick. A new custom.dic file was created with those words in it, and later testing showed they'd stuck. I copied the contents of the good F:\ custom.dic into the new one and saved it, then did some more testing. It behaved itself splendidly. So maybe we've fixed it! Time will tell.

I'm still curious how that m-argie- stuff happened and why the W-Z entries all disappeared, tho. Being "unique" isn't always the thrill some people like to think.

Thanks for your help. If the trouble returns, so will I.

 

BOBBO,

Did you add the asterisk?

 

Ramona:

No, I didn't. If the problem returns, I'll try doing that and see if it helps.

I'm under the impression that asterisks can be troublesome under some circumstances. Was it in the old autoexec.bat that an * told the system to not read that line? Wrong?