CS4 Bridge short term memory "keyword list"

Question

Greetings ,
I have a Mac G4 2002 with CS4 11.0.1 and I went through all my photos in one three day period and made keywords for the relevant image selections. I love the way it works. ..... BUT !  if I turn off the machine and later come back and open bridge to quick select my photo criteria for editing, my keyword list defaulted to the bridge example list that came with the system. I looked in Preferences and did not find a selection that seemed relevant.
I hope I am just being stupid, missing something simple like "Save As,  keyword list under name ....?" The keywords are still associated with the picture files. I can get back all of the keywords by spending a few hours and clicking one by one on every image in storage. The list eventually builds itself up to it previous glory. But shut down and you get to do it all over again.
Thanks for your assistance !

Answer 1

Yes, I do shut my computer down the correct way by going to the apple menu first and using the shut down menu function, more anal than that I close the applications that are open first prior to going to the apple menu.
Thank you for the purge cache suggestions.
I did purge once the cache files and it made no change in behavior.
On your suggestion : 
A:   [ I proceeded by opening some photo folders and clicked on some images so that the list could build up again some ( I only did a few folders ).
Then I closed out of out of the application and the shut down. On booting back the OS and opening the application the list had still shrunk. ]
I then repeated "A" and but on bringing the application back up I used the "Option" key hold down so that I could purge Preference files. Shrunk again!
I tried the "purge cache for folder" option, and then Repeated "A" and the result was the same, shrunken list.
I did learn that I did not need to shut down the computer to loose the keyword list however, it goes away with just the closing of the application option.
I also learned that the list is not completely lost now, it defaults to a shorter list of my own words (at least now it does). That default shrunken list is consistent the last two times on re-starting the application.
I am wondering now if there had been some error made in how a list could be put together. Like did I screw up with hierarchy protocol somehow, or should we restrict our naming to a only a two tier system instead of using a three tier system?
From Bridge the suggestion keywords (ie: Mathew, New York, Paris) don't come up anymore. I don't have those images, but interestingly enough, I don't see those names coming up anymore.
Earlier I did try weeks ago to reload the Photoshop CS4 package onto my computer hoping that would solve this problem. One thing I did not do at that time was use "FIND" to search out where relative preference files might lay and then dump those in the trash prior to re-install. I don't know, maybe I have no option but to try that again but by dumping the preferences prior to install.
Since we did just try the "option key" on start of application, does this fully do the same thing?
Thanks again for your suggestions!