[Gregory]

in my case, something within the pref file would act like a virus seed, eventually leading to corruption in the pref file. whenever I duplicated the backup pref file, I was duplicating the seed. at some point in time, I would have to delete all of my backups and start from scratch again.

I reported the corruption to Omni but they weren't able to determine the source of the problem or reproduce it.

one of the problems with the pref file is that it appears to hold more than just prefs. I believe it is this non-pref stuff that eventually corrupted my pref files.

(note. I visit quite a few Chinese sites and use multiple Workspaces.)