Ok, you are going to
LOVEthis one. I received you suggestion from my other open problem report to try older version of the product and it proved diagnostic for this one.
I downloaded the oldest version after first exporting the settings I had from the currently GA version. I then installed version 8.0; it verified my PRO license and it came up vanilla. I tried restoring my 1/24 .reg file and it failed.
So, thinking that maybe the whole restore process was FUBAR, I tried restoring the settings .REG file I had just exported to my desktop.
It worked. It even restored my license!
I asked myself, as I learned to when I was in tech support, what was different?
Other than .REG content and the exe version, the only other difference was location. All my configs from my old computer are stored on a
mapped drive on the old machine. The new config was stored on the desktop of my new machine.
I copied the 1/24 configuration from my mapped drive to my desktop and restored it, and, no suspense here,
it worked! It even installed my pro license and displayed all my tool bars buttons, even going to the point of complaining about missing wallpaper.
I will go back to the GA version and see if this oddity holds true, but I expect it does.
The problem appears to be with restoring settings from a mapped drive, in this case assigned to drive B: Technically, it is a peer to peer mapping, not a mapped LAN drive on a server, but I think today that distinction is inconsequential, but I am including it just in case.
I will edit this reply after I reinstall the current version.
EDIT: I am now running 8.1.2. The restore of the 1/24 settings from my local desktop worked.
Oddly, it stopped applying settings when it couldn't find a missing wallpaper I had not copied to the local drive. I only had one caption bar button showing. However, all the settings were still visible when I opened the DF settings dialog. Apply didn't work until I selected an image for the wallpaper. Apply then finished restoring all my settings, including all my buttons. It appears that DF has a stop-on-exception policy for applying settings rather than skip-on-exception. Not sure which is better. Just point it out so you can think about it.