I loaded one of my cities and got the plugin missing warning. I shutdown the game and looked
in the folders and behold, all of the data has been deleted. I was playing SC4 earlier in the day with another city and did not notice anything. Any issues with SUM doing this?
Much as I dislike necro-posting, I've been dealing with a similar issue. Occasionally, it seems that some of the files in my plugins folder will randomly get deleted, and I end up with either brown boxes or the warning that k808j mentioned. The deleted files seem to be totally random each time; it isn't limited to plugins that my active profile should disable. I can't think of any other possible cause of these deletions besides SUM, although I'm open to alternative theories. (I'm running SUMv3 with the Amazon digital version of SC4 Deluxe on Windows 10.)
The SUM is using a technology that "hides" files from the operating system via a special DLL that is accessing the file system directly. Since the tool has been developed many years ago, I can only assume that it doesn't work reliably under anything newer than Windows XP or Vista. Unfortunately, I haven't had any contact with JeanLucPicard2 since many years either, so I doubt this issue can be resolved.
Are the files still "deleted" after rebooting Windows? I can't remember for sure if the SUM installs a background service that is loaded with Windows, or if it only loads it when the tool is started. Can you run a file recovery tool like "Recuva" over your plugins folder and check if they actually have been deleted? Windows "deletes" files by marking the entry in the master file table only (if you're using an SSD, the "TRIM" feature is using this data to empty the flash memory cells occasionally, so this might not work).
Maybe I'm just terrified too easy,but what exactly is SUM?
I'm not familiar with this Term and Google couldn't help either.Found out something about virus resistant Sunflowers but my guess is we're not talking about agricultural Stuff,right?
This: http://kurier.simcityplaza.de/details.php?file=311