Vegas ate my homework

I was playing around with some motion GIF's and the croma key function. Everything was working fine with the GIF's playing with a normal video background, until I got an error message and the program wanted to shutdown. It asked me if I wanted to send a message to Sony about the problem, and the "system info" at the time of failure. I clicked the yes button, and it sent the message.

I went back to playing with the motion GIF's and the croma key, and after a bit it failed again. I decided to call it a day and exit the program.

The next day I went to edit a video with some more clips I shot, and I couldn't find the files when I clicked on the the "open" window in Vegas. ???? I went into Windows Explorer to see if I could click on one of the files, and found that Vegas has wiped out "all the files and sub directories under the main file that Vegas sets up in the "My Documents" directory. Nothing, nada, zilch. All gone. ????

What happened??? Is this common? I've gone to putting the files in a completely different directory, but I don't know if Vegas will try to kill them there if it gets hungrey again.