topic IDs disappearing from .shgs

Hello - I posted this earlier as a response to a thread, and I'm not sure it got out to anyone besides the original post-er, so I'm reposting. If this is a duplicate for anybody, my apologies.

I am in RoboHelp 8 (with all applicable service patches), using Word 2007 in compatibility mode, on Windows XP if that matters. We have an enormous, multi-.hlp system that we are required to generate as an .hlp and then as WebHelp. (Don't ask me why 🙂 ).

My problem is that in this enormous project, out of all our many .shgs, there are about 4 of them that have stopped working. I found the problem when I looked in my Broken Links section of the Explorer pane and saw a bunch of bizarre, one-letter topic IDs. They were all in these 4 .shgs - all the topic IDs that were being called from all the hotspots in these .shgs had simply disappeared and been replaced with single random letters.

I have deleted the .shgs, gone back to the .bmp, and redrawn them more than once. I was able to get them to stay in place for one WinHelp compile, but then when I went to generate the WebHelp output they were all back again.

(I considered giving the topics an alias of that one letter as a workaround, but unfortunately all of the one-letter context strings seem to be called by more than one .shg.)

This is perhaps the wackiest thing I have seen in 10+ years of working with RoboHelp, and that's saying something :-). Has anyone seen this before? Thank you,

Sandy