Well, I bummed. Several hours of work and apparently one of the saves didn't work right.

Here is the file in question.

http://stormvisions.com/junk/Layout041807.zip

The error message has

The file being accesed is invalid

Art Rage encountered an error while trying to load the painting you requested. The file did not appear to be an ArtRage painting.

I saved the file. I opened a new file so that I could try Fashmir's texture tutorial - wanted to see how the paper might be used to add texture without messing with my work in progress. I created a canvas as the screen size (it was a jpg if that is an issue). I tested it then closed without saving and tried to reopen my previous saved painting (the linked file above) and I get the error.

I'd appreciate it if you can clue me in what it might be so I can avoid it in the future i.e is there a limit on file sizes, or does the write operation take a while on a bigger file and somehow it wasn't finished saving etc.

A suggestion might also be to do what 3dS Max does and allow you to have an incremental Save As option so you can quickly save yourfilename+1 so hopefully a previous version might be good. I saved to the same file name not expecting any problems.

Anyway that's life I guess ... figured I'd report it.