Single Missing Variable in Data Recording

Have you ever seen ML just not record a single variable? I am not sure why it is doing this. For all cases, a single variable within one questionnaire is missing (the entire scale recorded properly except for one question in the middle of the scale that just dissapeared...weird!). Its a scale-response item, and does not differ in any way that I know of from the other questions in the file (other than the words of the question, obviously). Write data box is checked, its not a duplicate variable name, and its not one of the extraneous VAR001 computer-generated variables as I checked the labels and accounted for each of these. I thought maybe i forogot to put it in the ML .que file, but i double checked the actual experiment file and its definitely in there. i even looked in the excel file in case it didnt code into SPSS properly, but it dosnt seem to show up in either the byquestionnaire excel file or the byvariablename excel file. However, though the variable is not included in the byvariablename syntax, it IS included in the byquestionnaire syntax. It is not coding into SPSS or excel. It may be encoding into the .txt files, but I am having trouble confirming this because individuals variables in this section are not labelled.

Two questions:
1) What might be causing this so that I can prevent it occuring in the future?
2) Is there any way to retrieve the data from the .txt files if it did in fact record?

Thanks!