warren, it is very time consuming and tedious, but there is a way to pull some parts of your project back from the abyss.
after a crash like that all the temporary "swap"/history files that pixinsight creates are still in the temp directory. what i have done in the past is to copy all of those files out to somewhere else before restarting PI. then, restarting PI, i open or create an image of the same bit depth and dimensions, and then, say, invert it and undo the inversion. this creates a history file for the new image in the temp directory.
this is where things get ugly - you then have to copy one of your old swap files over the new swap file. then, you either re-do or double click the inversion in the history explorer... but of course what happens is the old swap file gets pulled in instead of the one belonging to the inversion. so now you've got a file which you can save as .fits or similar. you could use this to at least recover the last state of the main image you were working on. in theory you could restore the whole history this way but of course all you have are the images and not the actual processing history.
determining which file you actually need to copy over is kind of hard. typically though you can tell from the number of files with the same root filename which file is your main image. you might also be able to recover some of your masks as well. perhaps enough to keep working on the image...
now, maybe i'm reinventing the wheel here and there is some easier method, but as i recall PI does not know how to directly open a .swp file.
i think there are auto-saved .xpsm files also in that temp directory that are worth saving as well.
anyway if PI knew how to open one of its own swap files that would obviate the need for all of the above gymnastics.
rob
