Missing keyframes when opening fla-file

Question

I am working freelance on an animated show for children, animating characters in flash, and I have a problem that is driving me crazy.
I will try to explain it so it won't be too confusing..
This just happened on the file I am working on now, an animation of a character walking: The graphic symbol containing the legs had two keyframes in it (on frame 1 and 2) when I saved the file. When I reopened it, the legs had only keyframes on frame 1. When I check the swf I exported just before saving, the legs are fine.
Similar problems has happened many times now, sometimes keyframes are gone, other times they have turned blank, and on one occation graphic symbols had changed to empty movie clip symbols. The last swf exported has always been okay.
It has also happened when closing and immediately reopening, so I have ruled out sabotage..
I am using Flash 5.5, but the scenes are handed out by someone working in Flash 3 or 4. I import characters frome different documents into the scene. This often leads to many graphics symbols with the same name, but I make sure to put them in different folders, and also sometimes renaming the symbols. I suspected that could be the problem, but it doesn't seem to have been the case this time.
No one else on the team have experienced the same, though I am the only one working in Flash 5, if that matters.
Any clue, anyone?
Help will be much appreciated!
Thanks

Answer 1

Hi Rekeguf, hi Adobe.
The problem mentioned here is a very serious issue with Fash CS5 and Flash CS5.5 which we (a huge agency working a lot with Flash CS5) haven't found a solution for, yet.
The problem can be described as simple as the following:
You create an animation in some movieclip, save the file, close it, reopen it, and the movieclip is still there, but the animation is gone!!!!
Or: You change the animation in some movieclip, save the file, close it, reopen it, and the changed animation is gone, only the old state is in the movieclip.
Or: You have a movieclip containing only a simple PNG file. The PNG file is changed externally, you reimport it to the movieclip, deleting/overwriting the old one, save the file, close it, reopen it, and the old PNG is in there again, the changed one not even in the library or somewhere else.
Or: You have a movieclip containing only a static text field. You change the text in the textfield, save the file, close it, reopen it, and guess what, the old text is in there.
These problems occur totally randomly!!!! Sometimes they occur, sometimes they don't. Sometimes only one movieclip was affected, sometimes several ones. Sometimes it's only a small thing missing, like a text in a textfield, like a PNG that can be easily replaced, but often enough it's a whole timeline animation which we worked on for several hours.
This is almost like not being able to save at all!!!!
But hey Adobe, we already found a really decent workaround to avoid this problem your happy software confronts us with!!!
The trick is: don't close the file you're working on, don't close flash either, and don't turn off your computer over night. EVER! Leave everything open until the project is finished and payed for by the client.
Seriously, we're thinking about claiming our money back, aswell as the extra money payed to the electricity company for keeping the computers running all night. Let alone those hundreds of hours of work wasted for nothing but the excitement.
If you're interested, i can show you a screen capture of one of these problems occuring.
We're working mainly on MacOS 10.6 , but the problem seems to have occured on different operatings systems like Windows7 aswell.
And before you ask: it changes nothing if we save the file on a server or locally or create 10 backup-copies.
Why is this bug still out there if it's such a big thing!?