Yes most of the time restoring works. But when you get bad luck in a few ocassions, all the previous settings only restore blank pages, that is all tickers are lost. Have you ever met you tried to restore, the first xml didn't work (same blank page)? You feel anxious until you found one which worked. I don't understand why the mishaps can corrupt the previous xml too.
I never bothered to compare good vs bad tws.xml files. Fortunately, I have tws.xml's going back several weeks on Vista (previous version support is built into Vista's journaling file system).
You dnot' need to compare since it is obvious when you restore (all tickers are still gone -- blank page). I may need to restore several times until it works. Weird. So do you restore successfully (only tried once!) every time some mishaps occur?
I meant comparing the contents to see if there's a bad string or some such. I've only had one failed restore and bec I use the restore to move from home to/from office, I restore at least once a day.
woo hoo- i got it working tho I'm not sure how. I had problems where one computer was updating from the other, but not vice versa.