Lost metadata without warning in FLAC files

Yeah it will be cool when FLAC album art is supported but since it's possible to associate un-embedded pics it's not a major drawback. I just decided to have a look where they're all hiding -> I've got a folder "D:\..\SongbirdPortable\Data\profile\artwork\" filled with pics named as hashes like "3bb4d8d305f0808e7b672c1b4174c05a.jpeg" ( Delete or Edit)

I've been using the latest stable release (1.2.0 Build 1146) although it is packaged as a Portable App (from http://portableapps.com/apps/music_vi....

I tried installing the latest nightly (in the normal way rather than portably) and it did not seem to work. Task Manager showed the exe was running but it never did anything visibly even after several minutes (and disk access/system resource usage was negligible). Same result was obtained when launching from the "Safe Mode" and "Profile Manager" shortcuts on the Start Menu.

Next I uninstalled the nightly and tried installing the stable release as non-portable. I got the same behaviour as with the nightly - exe file running but nothing happened.

So then I uninstalled the stable release, went through the Windows registry and deleted all keys containing the word "Songbird" (both the ones relating to non-portable installations and the ones I had purposefully entered relating to the portable). Then I searched my C drive for anything relating to Songbird (i.e. Application Data and remnants in Program Files) and deleted all of that too. Then once again I tried installing the stable release non-portably and once again I found the exe did nothing but sit in the background. I left it running and went and made a cup of tea. I sat down and typed most of what you're reading now and noticed the exe occasionally using 2-4% of CPU resources in Task Manager and that its memory usage had gone up from the initial 16MB to 56MB. Then, after approximately 20 minutes doing nothing, I finally got a Songbird Setup::Welcome to Songbird window (weird huh?)

Anyway, now I have verified that when applying Album Art to a FLAC file in the latest stable release (1.2.0 Build 1146) it does indeed delete multiple Genre and Composer entries without warning and edits Track and Disc numbers as it sees fit. This time I tried Track and Disc numbers in the form "int/int" as in "disc 1 of 2" or "track 1 of 13" and it changed them to single numbers even though the application of Album Art has nothing to do with the FLAC tags (the associated jpegs are stored in "C:\Documents and Settings\Karl\Local Settings\Application Data\Songbird2\Profiles\snql1sno.default\artwork").

I have also now re-installed the latest nightly (1.4.0b3 Build 1303) and verified the same behaviour of deleting and editing tag fields without warning or reason. The only difference here is that the automatic "Get Album Art" instruction failed to retrieve an image (though it still deleted and edited FLAC file's metadata) and applying a jpeg directly from the hard disk did not make a copy in the "C:\..\artwork" folder (presumably the image was sourced directly - hell knows?)

As a solution-from-now-on I found I can change "about:config, songbird.metadata.enableWriting" to "false" and this saves FLAC metadata from unsolicited deletion. BUT it would have been a lot more useful if I'd known about this before 50 or so media files had 100 or so manually-entered Composer and Genre tags removed for no reason. Surely it should just read the first and skip any additional - why delete by default?? ( Delete or Edit)