[Texas Red]

Well... you are missing some of the "detail" of your situation there the beast. You say you are loading a Saved game, I assume, but had you exited the program after doing the Save, or is this just a Save and immediate re-load? How big of a task force was this, were there airplanes, were you submerged? In other words, was it ~really~ busy up top, or just a little? After you hit the Save menu, did you Name it a new, unique name, or just Save on top of where you were? After completing the Save dialog and actually "Saving" the game, did you pause a moment, and make certain the game was finished doing the writing to your hard drive? If you navigate to the "root" folder of your game and right-click on the SH4.exe program, and then left-click to choose "Properties", on that first "General" tab, toward the bottom under "Attributes", is the "Read-only" box checked? Are you therefore certain that you have LAA set correctly on the SH4.exe file?

If all of that looks fine, did you by chance happen to try to Save with a Replay at any point on this patrol? Navigate into your Save folder (generally C:\Users \UserName \Documents \SH4, unless you've changed it), go into "data", "cfg", "SaveGames", and find the latest date / time stamped and numbered folder there (hex numbers, so you will possibly see the letters A-F). If you select it in Windows 7, the Status Bar gutter across the bottom will have the info, but with Windows 10, you usally have to right-click the folder name, and choose "Properties" - you want to see what the size of the Save is, like "357kb" (rather tiny) or "1.48mb" (smaller than average), or "2gb" (whoops!) - fictionalized numbers, of course...

This is a save and "oops I screwed up" reload of the file. Sorry if that came off as rude. I was submerged and there were no airplanes. About 20-15 ships I'm gonna guess. It was kind busy up-top. I always name my save games a unique name. Usually the name of the patrol area with a "1" next to it for the number of saves in the area. For example, if it was Area 11-B I was ordered to patrol in, I would name the file " Area 11-B I" and if there was a second save in that area, I would save it as "Area 11-B II". No when it was done doing what it was doing I immediately went back to my game. The read only box is not checked. I have used the LAA exe on the SH4.exe multiple times. No, I don't even use replays. The size of the file is 2.77 MB.

when this happened to me i discovered that there was an error message hiding behind the black screen. the root cause was a config error of some kind.
my apologies that i do not remember more.

It is fine. That is actually the first thing I did was to Alt-tab to see if there were any error messages of some sort.

Yikes!!! Hang on...
Sorry the beast, i gave you the wrong link - try this

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That didn't work either.