I recently decided to have another go at Pool of Radiance. Unfortunately, all is not well.

Recalling that I'd had trouble with game crashes at chargen in the last install, I went ahead and applied the fix to pool.cfg so that it looks like this:

E
P
C:\POOLRAD\
C:\POOLRAD\save
F

C:\POOLRAD\ being the name of my Pool of Radiance directory within DOSBox (within my actual computer, it's C:\DOS\POOLRAD, but I don't think that matters). I saved and quit after the first fight when I'd noticed that I'd messed up one of the character's in-battle appearances during chargen. I can't remember why I reloaded that game instead of just overwriting it, but I'm glad I did, because my previous party had been overwritten with six copies of a single character. A few more experiments show that this is the norm. After creating an entire party, saving, and then reloading, they're all replaced by six copies of a single character.

Curiously enough, I notice a pair of PKCS #7 certificates in the POOLRAD directory called SAVEGWEN and SAVETIKA, two characters who I created, but dropped without using.