We've been having a problem lately where records in our contract (invoice) file are marked for deletion, but line items and other files associated with the contract remain in tact. If these contracts had been deleted intentionally, referential integrity (RI) would have caused related records in all files to be deleted. This has happened at a few of our clients, and they did not delete the contract manually. We have tested and reviewed code in several areas of the system, but we haven't been able to find a cause. Clients usually don't remember what, if any, activity they were performing on the contract, because they don't notice the contract is deleted until later. Some contracts are quite old, so we are not talking about new records only.

Today, we got a potential lead. A client having the problem noticed that the computer locked up while viewing a particular contract, and after rebooting the contract was marked for deletion. Reviewing the data, we also noticed that some purchasers associated with these deleted contracts were also deleted (these would not have been deleted by RI, by the way), which tells us we aren't dealing with random data corruption. I will continue reviewing the code for possible glitches, but have you ever heard of computer crashes causing deleted records in this manner?