I have this old game (Patrician 3 if someone's wondering) that worked pretty well until my PC was formatted few months ago. Since then, almost everytime I turn off my PC, the executable file of the game just disappears, and I have to reinstall it everytime. When I check the folder where the executable file was located, everything is ok (there are all the saves and every single other file) but there's no sign of that executable file, and of course the game is not starting up without it. Could you help me?

This happened to me with some games because of an antivirus (Avast) which mistakenly identified the .exe as a malicious file. Adding an exception to the installatiom folder solved the problem.

Sounds like an overzealous antivirus. Add the game .exe as an exception.

Yup, executables which go mysteriously missing are likely security software quarantining/deleting the file because it thinks it's malicious. If you downloaded the game from GOG.com then it's likely a false positive.

And if you are ever worried about something like this not being a false-positive, pop the file hash or the file itself over to VirusTotal.

But honestly, I can't think of the last time I seriously ran an antivirus.

Yes guys, it's Avast fault. Thanks guys

Depends on how much you are against using an AV that lacks the option to not quarantine suspected files automatically, lets just say that I prefer to not have to constantly go and check if I need to tell an AV that it should restore a bunch of 1K, 4K and 64K intros just as much as I prefer to not add any exclusions preemptively.

try clearing your data and reinstalling the game, or maybe your computer has crashed, reinstall windows, i think you should try online games at https://izigames net/, it will store in the cloud and you won't need to worry about data loss in the game.

Quite annoying when those flag legit programs. I sometimes make scripts with AHK and use a compiled AHK script to exe, which gets flagged as a virus. It just includes routines that may possibly be similar to used in some viruses thus likely the flag.

The main reason AHK scripts get flagged, is because many script kiddies use that forked language to make game bots and worse, and there are thousands of complaints about such, maybe more. Even the language AHK was forked from, a very early version of AutoIt, now far superior with later versions, suffers from false flagging with some AV, despite many years of banning discussions about game bots on the AutoIt Forum. Some of the flagging is due to the compressor used when compiling to EXE, if selected.