You know, it's a terrible thing to realize you're finally getting feeble-minded.
Brag, I believe you and everyone else who are having corrupted career saves may share a common problem. I stress this is a "may" and not "certain" because this information was found in a dusty, cobwebbed corner of my mind.
As I recall, SH3 does not get along well with some anti-virus software, such as Norton and McAffee. The reson for this is the AV software's "Real-time monitor" or "Resident Shield" or whatever they call it, runs in the background, quietly checking all file read/writes to make sure there's no virus activity on your system.
The trouble starts when SH3 is trying to save a career. The AV monitor briefly intercepts this save because it's making sure that a virus is not infecting the saved file and that SH3 is not doing anything to cause your system to be infected.
This has the unfortunate effect of disrupting SH3's read/write access, of which it expects to have complete and unfettered control. Despite the AV monitor's attempts, SH3 will simply drop the bytes in the queue and move on to the next one. The bits of the file that are still tied up in the clutches of the AV monitor never get written or arrive late, thus scrambling the contents of your game save!
My advice to SH3 players is to disable or shut down your resident antivirus monitor before starting SH3.
Use the Task Manager to make sure the av monitor is really shut down. It's fairly common to go through all the gryrations of clicking the system tray icon and exiting the program but the core executables are still loaded in the background where they can only be shut down by using the Task Manager.
Stupid security software vendors!
Hope this helps you, Brag! Spread the word to the other unfortunate souls for me, would you?
On the advice of a friend, I'm off to the General section of the forums.
