(MK4)
For some reason, at completely random intervals, the game simply loses all my records and unlockable and returns the controls to default, almost as if I never even played.

I spoke to support about this and the person assigned to my inquiry kept insisting about it being an issue with an antivirus and/or Windows Defender, so I put the entire folder of the game on the exception list after re-installing it, but the problem persists, so I am officially out of ideas.

Has anyone encountred this issue/know a fix for it?

I only realized much later that I forgot to specify AND that I can't edit the title, but yes, I am speaking about Mortal Kombat 4.

I did, and was told by support later to make a specific folder in the C:/ entry among other things, and so far every suggestion I've been given didn't work.

That's strange.
Can you gith-click the folder and see if it's write-protected?
Sometimes Windows will make the whole system drive protected, which can screw up some save folderrs if they're in the installation folder.

I have 2 hard drives on my laptop si I installed on D:\.

Another possibility but it sucks big time on laptops and it's annoying is to partition the hard drive with a system partition and a games partition maybe?

By the way, I've been searching everywhere to try and help you, but I can't find the save for this game, does anyone know where it's located?
PCGamingWiki doesn't seem to know and given that the config file seems to be in the Register I wonder if it's the same.

What you mean by gith-click? Or do you mean checking the properties to see if "Read Only" is checked?

I never heard about that partition thing so I don't know how it works.

Well, from what I've seen in a different post, someone said the location of the save file is located in the registry at:

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\VirtualStore\MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\GT Interactive

Not sure if this helps, but I've asked a more tech savvy friend about it and he said that if you take out a .reg file, (in the case of MK4 the one called config) and double click it, the game will look for the registry to restore things and not the other way around.

I made a typo I meant right click indeed.
Yeah apparently since it's old-school porting and kinda crass (Eurocom), it seems the data is saved straight to the registry, which is kinda nasty, I found the post you mentioned.

If you use a registry cleaning app, try not using it or setting it to a lighter cleaning routine maybe?

Oh! That would explain it, much more informative than support pretty much flipping me off and sending me a link to the game cheats to unlock stuff again. I do have Ccleaner on my laptop, but I don't have it setup to run automatically/in the background, the only thing I can think about is Windows Defender's automatic security checks? But I don't know if those go as far as checking the registry and refreshing it. Although it's difficult to discern since it ran another one recently and I still have my stuff.

I don't think Windows Defender does check the registry, however CCleaner might if you let it do the big clean, and I know it killed my old Machinarium saves when the game was 100% in Flash because it was saved in the cache.
So I stopped flushing the Flash cache then I stopped using CCleaner because it didn't seem to be that good anymore to me.
Maybe once it did a massive registry purge and removed that save for whatever reason?

Windows Defender never did anything to me MK4 save, so it should go fine on this regard.

On the other hand, since I don't really care about the endings and I don't really want to save some crazy winning streak, I'm fine with using the cheat menu to quickly unlock Goro and Noob. Yet it definitely shouldn't be the go-to solution as it's a copout.

Here's hoping your save stays fine.

Yeah I didn't think it did either, which is why it annoyed me that the guy from Support kept being so persistent about it for several replies. I haven't used Ccleaner in a long time so maybe I'll also just get rid of it since I use Revo Uninstaller for a similar function anyway, just to be double sure I don't accidentally delete the saves of any game like you did.

It's a possibility, yeah.

Well, I like having the ability to watch them at any time and I do like saving my scores, specially since I often don't expect to have big streaks since the AI likes to input read after a while lol It's just annoying to have to change the control settings and having to go to the cheats menu just to unlock the secret characters every time, you know? That's why I was hoping someone more tech savvy could provide me with an actual solution. But thank you for your insight regardless, I learned some new things. If nothing else, I'll make a new config.reg file every so often and save it in case the file decides to go on vacation again.