ILSpy.xml is the only copy of everything a user puts in it - assembly
lists above all, which people build up over years and, as the report
shows, edit by hand. A file that fails to parse was replaced by defaults
on the next save, which happens for something as incidental as a window
position, so the data was gone before the user had a chance to notice
anything was wrong.
The file is now moved aside first, under a name that says what it is, and
an earlier copy is never replaced: two bad starts in a row must not cost
the file that still has the data. A typo in hand-written XML is usually
one edit away from readable, so what matters is that it still exists.
Telling the user is still not solved - that needs somewhere central to
report it from, which the settings do not have yet - but the file is
recoverable, and its name says why it is there.
Assisted-by: Claude:claude-opus-5:Claude Code
Siegfried Pammer