User created text variables don't work anymore...What's going on? Help! Captivate 4.

Question

Captivate 4 issue.
Okay, I use Captivate 4 almost every day for eLearning development, so I know the program pretty well.
As our LMS is horribly difficult to use, I typically create a certificate at the end of the course I am working on that will display the user's name on it that they can print and give to their supervisor.
On the first page of the course, I put a text entry box in where they key in their name, and I capture that in a user variable (typically called staff_name) that I then drop into a text caption on the certificate.
This has worked successfully numerous times.
Now, for some reason, it doesn't.  One of two things happen:
1.  The entire text caption with the variable in it does not display....it's just a blank space where that caption should be, and that includes any other text in the caption.
2.  The caption appears with all of the other words...just not the variable. 
Is there anything that I might have overlooked?  Some strange captivate bug where user created text variables disappear over time.
Oh yea, that reminds me...system variables don't work either.  I put the date string on the certificate as well, and that wasn't showing up either.
It's like all of a sudden, the ability of Captivate 4 to drop a variable into a text caption just doesn't work anymore.
Ideas?
Thanks so much.
Rob

Answer 1

Hi Lilybiri.
It's been awhile since this post...I ended up just re-installing Captivate onto my system, and that cleared up the problem.
It has since, however, reared its ugly head again. 
I had a lesson set up that had a page counter at the bottom.  Simply said "Page 1 of 25" then "2 of 25" etc. on each page using the current slide info and slide count variables.
It worked perfectly up until today when a reviewer suggested changing the caption text to simply "2/25"
So, I edited the caption with the variable, and the exact same symptoms described above came to pass again....any text captions with variables in it will not show up in the running .swf file.  I tried deleting the .dat file, and that didn't help.  In addition, the variable length is not 0. 
As I work remotely and re-installing captivate would take hours upon hours (or a trip to the office) I don't see re-installing it as a viable option at this point.
Anyway, it's pretty frustrating, and an obvious bug.  I wish my company would just upgrade to 6 already...
Other ideas, though?
Rob