[Mobhack]

I have just run these through the debugger, and the passwords dont change between turns.

However - the save file you sent with the game you cannot load has nuked the "S" character with what appears to be an 88 hex (shown as a vertical black bar in my UK debugger) in tobi|piel. (I used the verical pipe there as it is not a regular character - but may be an umlaut or such on a foreign language keyboard??)

Running the game on fails on the path having changes as I am running on a different folder etc - but the extracted passwords on my machine are still A-OK at the point the path gets rejected - they have been extracted and decoded fine. And at that point they have been saved and encrypted to file and re-extracted back from disk, so that mechanism is OK.

So the only thing I can think of is a transmission error, or a memory error (RAM or Disk) on one of the machines.

Transmission error - if you are using different compression routines (e.g. one is using winzip and one winrar) or different versions, oddities can occur. Winrar allegedly can unzip zip files - but as it is not winzip, there may be differences in its zip file algorithm. (I use Winzip, and never RAR).
Also - it may just be a send error in your email programme - a resend may work (I have had recent problems with zips I sent to Don, that opened fine etc on my machine, even if I used the copy of the zip in the "sent items" folder, but gave CRC errors and so forth on his end, both of us using winzip. But we had regularly exhanged zips fine before, and the problem then went away after a day or so with no change and recent ones worked with no hiccups). This could be any link in the email chain - like anti-spam and virus checking add-ons as well as the email clients themselves. Me suspects the anti-spam and anti-virus stuff (including any the ISPs have) and that a later signature file update or suchlike fixed it behind the scenes!

I would try a resend of the known good save point, ensuring you have the same compression utilty. (if you are both on broadband - try sending the uncompressed file perhaps). Maybe try several such - if one "takes" then the transmission chain likely had a glitch.

You could also try sending via a different ISP/email client route - e.g if you have say a hotmail or suchlike account.

Memory error - a bad file block on the hard drive could cause corruption, as can a glitch in RAM. You would need to do a scandisk on both machines to eliminate lost clusters - and try again. Failing that - a scandisk with sector search for bad drive sectors (which takes forever so is best done as an overnight run).

RAM errors - extrememly rare these days, symtoms are generally a dead machine, not dead bits - you would need to find a utility that examines RAM (I think Norton has such?).

I would look at the transmission (compression and email client as well as ISP) area first. Especially if you have been doing RAR one way and ZIP the other.

Cheers
Andy