Spontaneous changes in stored data - bug?

[Henry Chase]

Dear SPSSX list

I have a very peculiar bug which seems to change stored values in saved SPSS files. Essentially values in the document appear to change spontaneously for no reason - not all, but a couple of my documents appear to suffer from this. Has anyone else had any experience of this, and if so, do they know how to fix it? I am running SPSS 14.0 on Windows XP.

Many thanks

Henry

Henry Chase
PhD Student
Behavioural and Clinical Neurosciences Institute
Department of Experimental Psychology
University of Cambridge
Tel: [phone]

[Daryl Schrock]

Dear Henry and list,

I had a similar problem where I noticed that when I sorted a file by two
variables, for some unknown reason SPSS copied *most* but not all of the
variable values of one case into a second case and deleted the original
variable values of the second case. Because it did not copy *all* values
of the first case's variables into the second case, the error was not
caught by the "identify duplicate cases" tool in SPSS. I was able to
recreate the error on one occasion, but every other time I resorted the
list by those two variables, SPSS performed the operation correctly, and I
was never able to figure out why SPSS did this. This experience reinforced
the value of keeping a backup copy of the dataset.....so, I don't have any
answers for you, Henry, but I was wondering if anyone besides Henry and I
have noticed problems with this? I also am running SPSS 14.0 on a Windows
XP machine.

Daryl Schrock, PhD