I'm usually really good with missing DLL files as long as I know what they are. But this was giving me an 'error 126' with a long string of gibberish right before that error. A google search revealed that several others had received the same message with the same software and there were no successful repairs out there! I tried installing the software on top of the old.....didn't work. I tried uninstalling, rebooting, and reinstalling the software....didn't work.
I had the forethought to copy my "familytree.flt" file before doing anything. I knew that I had close to 1,000 names already in that file since I started putting stuff in last week (I still have a notebook full to update the file with as well.) I decided to look for something to convert that file to something readable (ie flw, ged, etc) to another tree program since this obviously wasn't going to work on this computer. There was nothing out there to convert it. You had to be able to get into Family Tree Legends to convert the file. Well, I wouldn't need to do that if FTL was working. I decided then that IF I did get the software to working again, the first thing I would start doing is making a GED file every now and then (read: everytime I finish a session) as a backup.
I finally decided to go into the restore feature and selected a file from yesterday, when I knew that the software was working properly. It took a while, but I figured that it would be worth it, if it worked. Especially with the thought that if those little files could adjust that software, there is other software in my computer that could've been affected and I might not detect it for a while. Better to fix it now than fret more later.
It said that it didn't change any files, but that wasn't totally true. When I went to open FTL, it started reinstalling the software again. I thought, here we go....dead end again. But this time it actually worked! I went back to my familytree.ftl file though and it had significantly reduced in size. Knowing that meant that it had gone back to a time before all of the additional entries, I closed the software back out and copied my stashed file back over the newly written file. All is right in the world again. Well, maybe not everything...but everything is right with my software again!