After having just recovered from a short but weird series of crashes, that luckily was easily fixed by the "good old" renaming of the user folder (phew... ), I started wondering, what could have caused this little incident, as it happened between turning off my computer yesterday and turning it back on today (at least I think everything was in order yesterday, I can't be 100% sure, obviously), without any new plugins added recently or addons, no changes to the registry, no internet connection or Windows Update to foul something up, no viruses etc. I'm stumped, frankly. But I'm sure I'm missing something...
So basically what I am asking: what else could foul up the User Preferences on a - obviously only seemingly - random basis, that I am missing here? And like I said before the problem itself has been solved, I just want to know what caused the problem to prevent crashes like this in the future...

My guess is that at some point (perhaps during the first crash), file I/O was interrupted somehow and some file ended up "corrupt". It could have been the xsiprefs file.

Or, resetting the defaults to the factory settings forced Softimage back to normal (like in the old cartoons where someone pounds on the top of the TV to fix the reception).

Again thanks. I'll file this crash under "X" then...

the xsipref file is an ASCII file. I doubt it can be corrupted, but you can look at its content directly in notepad to see what's up. Many other files in those folders are ASCII as well