John, I don't want to sound belligerent, but this, "but once it's written to the drive it should NOT be affected just by losing power," is simply not true. Okay, it is, but the operative word is "should."

"Anything (sic) changes to an open file, not saved when the power drops will be lost," I'm not referring to what is in memory. I'm speaking specifically about the hard drive. And not user files, but app and system level files. If a file (meaning anything that appears in the file allocation or file system table) is open, regardless of RO or RW mode, it is at risk if you drop power without a clean shutdown. On reboot, there is a chance that what is in the TOC doesn't match the pointers on the drive, and scandisk will convert those files to "system recovery files" - FILE000?.CHK. I'm not saying that this will happen every time, but it's has happened often enough to me. Open the recov file in a text editor and you can see (if you know the file format, or search for comments) what the file used to be.

If you'd like, next time I have this happen I'll send you the recovery files.

I agree with you fully - any written file, especially read only, should be safe from a crash. But I've had losing system files happen often enough to know that what should and what is are two different things.