It appears the IDE is scrambling the information that normally opens the project that was open when the IDE was shutdown.
To help my troubleshooting, where is this information stored?
Details:
This is the 2nd time the IDE forgot the startup configuration.
Today I started the IDE and received an error the main file of a sketch was missing. I'm assuming this is because the IDE thinks that sketch is the startup default (at the moment). The issue is: this sketch was moved 2 months ago, and has not been opened since before moving.
In addition, on opening I get the message:
Here the issue is, this file does not exist in my Arduino folder (under My Documents). This file is on another drive, and it hasn't been opened since Nov 2023.
AND yesterday I installed megaTinyCore. Today the board manager shows it installed but the examples are missing.
I had a very similar problem and I have had to stop using it. Many people are using it without these issues so it must be something to do with my setup. For example I access my files on a shared drive. Maybe that has something to do with it. It worked flawlessly for a long time then all of a sudden one of my sketches which I had worked on for hours was all scrambled up. I had to spend a couple of hours re-building from a backup.
The only thing I can suggest is to use Visual Studio with Visual Micro or some other solution until the problem is figured out.
I used the pre-ide version for over a decade and never encountered a problem like that.
My system is pretty vanilla. Arduino sketches are in folder ...... My Documents\Arduino
No network no other issues with the hardware.
To address an issue loading megaTinyCore, one step was to uninstall the IDE (as well as every file I could find related to the IDE, including one hiding in users/John/.ArduinoIDE
Then I reinstalled. This time I selected for the current user only instead of for anyone to use. Not sure why it makes a difference but it puts all the code in the ...AppData\Local folder.
The file could be in a temporary folder (do a windows cleanup). If you "launch" a .INO from a zip file, the file is extracted, and you get the "needs to be in a fold by the same name."
I am not certain why the IDE must launch with a file in its environment. I prefer a blank. I've had the same experience as you with 3-year-old files being the file used to launch the IDE. I also am not a fan of "no internet, no IDE"
