Hi Raphaël,

The fact that 'startup.mar' got chopped down to zero bytes
suggests to me that something very drastic happened to your Guide
folder. It also means that even if you copied in the default
'startup.mar' and fixed it up, you'd have lost most of your
settings anyway: your lat/lon, time zone, preferences in
colors and limiting magnitudes and data shown, and so on, are
all stored in 'startup.mar'.

So I'd recommend deleting your Guide folder, and re-installing
from the CD-ROM.

It _is_ a good idea to set things up as you wish, then use File...
Save Mark, and create a mark file called something like "Personal
Defaults". This will serve two purposes. If 'startup.mar' is erased,
you can copy your backup mark to its place. But also, if you're
running Guide and have made lots of changes for some very particular
reason, you can go back to your "normal" state with File... Load
Mark... "Personal Defaults".

Note to all: if you have a corrupted 'startup.mar' file, please
e-mail it to me _before_ fixing it. I've gotten several reports of
such corruption, but have no idea as to how it's happening. Perhaps
with a few examples, I can find an answer to this. Also, if you have
any ideas as to how it happened ("I was doing _this_ when it occurred"),
I'd like to hear about it.

Thanks! -- Bill