Lost Setting / Setting Not Saving

Hi everyone,

I'm using the private internet access VPN service, and having problems in that the VPN connection will fail if left for any period of time. I've been in contact with their help desk, and have submitted error logs which suggest that some of the .exe's are being blocked by the bitdefender (I have total security) firewall.

I've had the advice of adding trusted zones IPs, I've added virus scan exclusions to the folder/files, I've added exceptions in the firewall for every .exe and I've added folder path exceptions in the hope of allowing everything, I've also added the whole appdata\temp folder as their program unpacks there.

still having problems:

When I first started trying to add the zones, after a reboot, all zones I added had been lost. Also, after setting the TAP adapter which is the VPN's installed adapter, to Trusted, stealth mode off and generic=yes, the settings were lost.

After a few more times, the adapter settings and zone IPs have now been saved, but internet sharing = yes and block port scans=no will not save at all, there's no way of keeping the settings.

Additionally, a few months ago I set game mode to on, and gave it the address to a game .exe and it would switch between the modes when i opened the game - after checking last night, game mode is off, and the rule has been deleted.

perhaps most importantly, everytime i open bitdefender, it's in autopilot, then switches over to user mode after a couple of seconds - could it be possible everytime the application is minimised it switches over to autopilot and loses all the settings that have been adjusted?

Every night now I've been changing bitdefender settings, uninstalling and re installing the PIA VPN client, adding scan exclusions, folder exclusions, adding allow exceptions through the firewall, then in the morning, after the connection has failed, i email the error log to the PIA support team. They then tell me what has been blocked - there's no logic to it, it seems to do it's own thing, which is what i'd imagine it would do if i turned it from user mode to autopilot?

So the long and short of it, there are a lot of posts on the forum with this issue, yet no definitive advice other than upgrading to the latest version, but people have had this issue sine 2011 and I have the latest version. would a complete reinstallation or repair be a step to consider yet?

If so, I have so many exceptions and firewall rules, i'd really like to save them somehow - last time upgrading from 2013 i lost everything and it took a day to put them all back!!

does the fact it doesn't seem to save sometimes suggest a damaged install/xml file?

regards,