A couple of times EndNote crashed and has given the directions for recovering it. (Tools/Recover Library) I didn’t look at individual files the first time it happened, nor the after the second recovery.
Yesterday I noticed that the attached file had a thumbnail image indicating the computer didn’t recognize the file type. And I noticed there was no file name. No file extension. I tried double clicking and get the ‘do you want Windows to find something on the web to open this?’ message.
What could cause this to happen? Is the EndNote program itself unstable?
The program itself isn’t unstable, but when PDFs with relatively long names are created in a folder with the same long name, in a somewhat deep directory structure, the full filename which includes the whole path can exceed the filename length limitations of the Window operating system. – Unfortunately what Endnote doesn’t do, is report this to the user when it happens, at least in any error that a user can interpret, and this is probably the reason for the crash and the reason the filename are truncated and not recognized. This is an unfortunate consequence of the .DATA subfolder restructuring by the endnote developers a couple of versions ago.