Quote Originally Posted by adm View Post
I disagree. In my experience a cold boot (removing the mains power) does "cure" problems that a reboot from the menu doesn't (menu/standby and restart/reboot).
That might affect some electrical components, but it won't affect the contents of a file-system. which would be the issue here.

As the epg.dat file was consistantly missing on start-up that indicates the copy in RAM was corrupt on shut down. Surely then a deep standby should have killed/flushed the data in RAM?
Yes, ut if the EIT data being collected was somehow odd (why was ITV HD missing a day?) such that it corrupted the in-RAM data structure each time then the file would be deleted at each shutdown. (It is possible to have apparently-full EPG data but for it to be corrupt on write-out)
And if you were tuned to Freesat at start-up you won't be collecting any data for Freeview at that time, so it would be empty when you switched to it, which you would see immediately. The Freesat would have had several seconds ot populate before you could see its EPG.