I should add this to my list of reasons for choosing which program to use as your novel-writing environment, actually. I have projects I have been working on off and on since 1996; if I were willing to work with something like Word, how many upgrade cycles would I have been locked into paying for in order to keep my older work readable to me at all ? Whereas plain text files worked on in emacs are as legible now as they were then.
Probably a good reason. I only just started using this program sometime last year, and the problem was more me upgrading to the most recent update instead of reading the forums to find out if it was completely stable. I stopped using Word after my b/f found this one. It's shareware, so it doesn't have to be paid for, though it does pop up a window everytime it's opened to ask for a donation. The good thing with the program is that I was able to export the actual text of the story into a txt file, and just copy and paste from that. I'm just annoyed I'll have to retype all the character notes, cause that's the part of the program that messed up.