I just laid my hands on a copy of Vue d'Esprit 4 a week ago, and have had a marvelous time with it, as you can see from the attached picture.... kind of my personal answer to Myst island...

Last night disaster struck. The last couple of times I opened the scene it kept telling me it could not find a given object or file called 'planche.something or other' (can't recall the file extension). Then it brought up a timeline window, which is odd because I haven't even tried to mess around with the animation plugin. Then it refused to open at all. When I try to open the file, the thumbnail of the image you see is all blurred, as though caught halfway through the rendering process. The other experimental scenes I've doodled around with open just fine.

Ran Scandisk; hard drive is error free. Ran Norton; no viruses in evidence. I'm running a Dell Pentium 733 with a GeForce 2 graphics card and 128 MB of memory -- an old machine, but still serviceable and well above the specs on the box. I emailed Eon's tech support, but I'm not sure what they can do from there about a (apparently) corrupted file.

Does anyone have any idea of what might be wrong? Am I doomed to lose a week's worth of delightful experimentation?