ML Shutting Down/Losing Data

Hi Blair et al.,

I've been waiting to see if there was a response to 05-05-2011 12:43 PM
by wbshreves about random shutdowns, because I've been experiencing a similar problem. But I haven't seen any response (perhaps this person was responded to privately). My problem has been this (and I've had to do some radical things to even get data at this point):

I'm using ML with DRT to administer sets of questionnaires and have participants do a reaction time task. The DRT RT task is embedded (or was) in the ML session. I'm running Vista Home Basic Service Pack 2 and ML 2010.2.19, and the newest version of DRT. There are no backscreens, backvideos, special styles, video presentations, html presentations, photo presentations, or anything fancy. Participants are simply responding to (almost entirely) scale responses, with a few fill-in-the-blanks, etc. The only thing keeping this from being the most basic of studies (at least concerning the ML part) is the embedded dRT session.

What happens is this: About 15-20% of the time, when participants get to the DRT part of our study, embedded, the whole system crashes. Later, if we restart from the beginning using the same participant ID, the data is gone (and we've looked *everywhere*). This was happening quite a lot, as I've mentioned, enough so that we de-imbedded the dRT task from the ML task, even though that made things more complicated.

I'd appreciate any help on getting this sorted out as the reason we got ML and DRT licenses for this study was so we could use them together.

If more information than is given is needed, just let me know. I'm relaying information from someone who has been actively running the study. We can get our computers updated to Windows 7 or can downgrade to XP if either of these things would be helpful. I just need to find some way to collect data consistently.

Thanks a bunch in advance,
Sean