Hi!  I'm using Windows 7 with Windows Live Media Maker.  I have been working on an extremely long, complex movie project.  I've invested several days.  My blood, sweat and tears are in this damn project.

The program crashes often, and for that reason, I make saves after every single change I make.  I had 138 carefully trimmed video clips that were around 15 minutes in total.  At one point, about an hour ago, the program crashed and I stupidly agreed to save it before forcing it closed.  Now, whenever I open the project file, it show's "20 of 138" at the lower left and it says that the movie's length is 3:18.69.

Originally, all I got was the cursor and a bunch of white space where the video clips were supposed to be.  When I hit play, the tracker would move, but nothing would display in the preview.  After closing and opening the project file a couple of times, eventually 20 of the thumbnails reappeared and are now preview-able.  The cursor/tracker thing plays farther ahead.  The 20th clip ends at the 1:40 mark, but the project keeps on playing the "invisible" clips past that point, until it reaches the 3:18 mark, at which point it seems to be done.

When I tried to recover my data, I only had one option for recovery (and that was a version of the project file from about 7 hours before the crash (I'd been working on it that entire time D:) so I think it loaded in an autosave from my appdata.  Is there any way to get a later save back that I might not know about?  I don't have system restore enabled and when I tried to recover previous versions it said there were none available.

I attempted to export the project as a movie file and ended up with a perfectly fine file- but, as I feared, it was only 3:18 long.  I think around 46 of the original 138 clips made it into the export.  I'd really, really like to get the other ~90-100 lovingly ordered/edited clips back.  Any suggestions?

Rebecca

EDIT:  When I zoomed in all the way on the pane with all the thumbnails, the missing clips reappeared.  I can trim them, but I can't interact with them in any way.  I can't play/preview them, copy, select, etc.  I saved the project file under a new name hoping this would help, but no luck.  I'm encouraged to find that they're still in there (sort of).  I just don't know how to make it so that I can use this file.