All of a sudden for some weird inexplicable reason the saves for most of my installed GOG games have vanished. These include: Fallout 1, Baldur's Gate 2, Planescape: Torment. Blood, MDK, Rayman Forever and Neverwinter Nights. The only games not affected were Hitman 2, Thief 3 and Arx Fatalis. This has obviously left me completely devastated especially in the case of Baldur's Gate 2 which I have played for a quite large amount of hours and worried that the other three games will follow suit. I don't mean to blame GOG but it is mysterious when none of the non-GOG games installed were affected by this error. Perhaps it had something to do with Rayman Forever as that was the last game I installed and up until now I thought that that was the only game where I lost my saves. What is going on? Has this happened to anybody else?

Permissions issues. Either you were running those games as Admin and now you're not or the other way around. Luckily your saves are probably intact, it's just a matter of either reverting the Admin situation or copying over the saves from the directory where the game was placing them before to the directory where it's placing them now.

To address the issue of why it has only affected GOG games; GOG games do not remove save games at a random point, nor do GOG have any kill switch on your games. The reason it has affected your GOG games rather than others is that older games stored their save games in the installation directory, which is now a very bad place to put them, as that is usually program files, and that location is protected and has all sorts of virtualisation going on.

The only reason this would happen is if you've in some way changed the location you're accessing your save games at (or if you accidentally deleted them). As Namur has said, you should first make sure you haven't suddenly started or stopped accessing them as administrator. Are there any other system settings you've recently changed?

I wasn't trying to make it sound like a conspiracy or something.

The only thing I can think of, which was several days ago (whereas this started happening today) was not being notified whenever an application wanted to "change" my computer, so that I can just double click like in XP (running on 7 now). Otherwise I haven't changed permissions and I gave myself full control over BG2 for example a long time ago.

I know, sorry if I suggested you were. I was just clarifying why it was only GOG. This sounds like you've turned off UAC. This would almost certainly achieve the result. You possibly wouldn't see it until you'd saved a new game, then attempted to reload it (as then the new path would kick in). Could you explain exactly what steps you took to do this?

I do, though I'm not sure I should tell you. There's a mixed opinion on this forum as to whether or not users should leave UAC on, I'm with the 'Leave it on!' crowd as it is more secure. However, I'll leave the choice to you.

Basically when you originally had it on, your save games were going to a virtualised location in program files. The actual physical location was (replace <username> with yours):

C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com

Various bits of Win 7 magic then allowed the games to resolve this path using relative paths. Once you turned off UAC they started behaving like they used to, where they just wrote directly to the c:\Program Files (x86)\GOG.com directory. If you look in your various games folders in that directory, you'll find all your new saves, which you could copy over your old saves on top of. If you wanted you could try just blanket overwriting the whole of the GOG.com folder, I have no idea what this would do so I'd suggest you fix them on a case by case basis.

EDIT: Before you replace anything, back it up first!

And I always thought it was the boogie monster eating my save files ...
Explains a lot...

Makes sense, though I have to say Windows 7's way of doing things really mystifies me as a seasoned XP user (just upgraded earlier this year, skipped Vista and everything).

Also, I understand where you're coming from with UAC; it is more secure, in the same way that installing security cameras in front of every window and door on your house is more secure. The thing is if you don't let strange people inside your house and have a competent security system set up then the only thing that can get in is dedication, which can also get past UAC.

To me the only use it has is to prevent noobs from accidentally running something dangerous. It is useful if the malicious software is already on your machine and the UAC prevents it from running programs on its own, but the only way it could get on the machine is if it's really well disguised and got past your antivirus program and you in one way or another put it there or allowed it to put itself there. Not saying nobody makes mistakes and does stupid things (I have many times) or that anybody is immune to well designed malware but when you've been using Windows for 8+ years and downloading potentially dangerous stuff you begin to notice the general warning signs and if you are as prudent as I am will never run something if its origins or purpose is a mystery.

Well, if you want to re-ignite the UAC debate feel free to start a thread. I'll just say that I've been working as a professional C# Programmer for 8+ years, and I believe that every security feature should be used to reduce your likelyhood of falling into that unfortunate bit of the venn diagram of their attack vector. Though I will admit I have written an application that totally bypassed UAC, and MS don't seem to be closing that door.

No I don't; it is totally my opinion and I'm not saying it's useless. I won't pretend to have the same experience as you do either (I have dabbled in several programming languages but I don't possess even intermediate-advanced knowledge of any of them, currently picked up C++ again actually) but the fact is if you don't put yourself at unnecessary risk then no harm will come to you. Of course it's not as simple as that but I rarely ran into problems with viruses on XP with this philosophy.

Anyway thanks for all your help and your useful insights. In any case the original problem has been solved.

Nah, no need to even mess with UAC. Just move the game folder outside of the Windows directory. Heck, move the User folder out as well, for good measure (takes more work with regedit to change registry pointers, of course). I have my Users directory and Games directory moved to an entirely different drive and run with all security measures turned all the way up. Never had an issue.