Not really a problem, just curious...

An application that had been open but idle for over 24 hours suddenly bombed out with a syntax error!

It was Family Tree Maker software, so not something that's doing a whole load of crunching in the background, while you get on with something else. Not dissimilar to just leaving a spreadsheet or Word document open.

It's not a big deal unless it becomes a regular occurrence and/or data is lost, but what would cause it to suddenly hit a syntax error after such a long time sitting doing nothing? I don't even have automatic web synchronisation enabled - which is an option. So it can't have hit a problem trying to sync. It somehow hit a syntax error while it was just idling, waiting for input? Doesn't seem to make sense.

T.

Probably a memory leak and it bombed out when it ran out of memory.

Or a field overflow as some background timing counter clocked back round to zero

Got a feeling I've left it idle for longer than that before - I'm not a "tidy desk" person, and exactly the same applies to my computer desktop - I often have several works-in-progress open at once - one or two not touched in a few days (yes, I do remember to save them! )

So it seemed odd that it can usually be left to its own devices indefinitely, but suddenly decided to throw a wobbly. It's not new or recently upgraded software either.