I was pretty sure i saw somewhere a possible cure for this, or at least where in the file system to verify settings arent lost.

Every once in awhile i load p3d and all the assigned buttons are mixed up/lost.

Does anyone have any tips on where to look to keep this from occurring?

 

Thanks in advance

The Standards file is located in the same directory as the P3D.cfg.  It's strange you are losing your settings.  You might want to run P3D after disabling your Windows Defender.  Defender has an issue where it will disable something it doesn't like whenever you start up the program.  Just make sure your Firewall is enabled at all times.  I get a faster startup/loading time when disabling Defender.  Defender will enable itself later but you should have started up and loaded your scenario by then.  Same goes if you have an add-on antivirus program.

It would be nice if Microsoft let us know what they quarantined or did not allow to be installed or changed.  Controlled folder access is the culprit most of the time.  If turned on, it will disable any writes to protected files or folders and change the attribute for each file/folder to Read Only.  I keep it off because it won't allow me to change the p3d.cfg or dll.xml.  It took me a long time to discover this and I actually reinstalled P3D a couple of times because all of my files and folders were read only and I did not know who or what changed the files to read only.  Tried to remove the read only but impossible.  I wish I could keep Windows Defender off permanently as I hate anti-virus programs.  They give everyone a false positive they are safe when an anti-virus program is running.  That's why it is easy to get Ransomware if you visit the wrong website.  Anti-virus programs makes it fun for hackers to try to get around anti-virus security.  If you have your firewall turned on, it will be very difficult for any virus to get through and you already know that there is no virus when downloading add-ons like PMDG, P3D, etc., as that software is scanned for viruses before putting it on their site for consumer downloads.