All global settings (like the wallpaper, etc) is stored in system.sav.
Hmmm... are you on Steam? Cloudsynch can sometimes mess with you, especially if you play across multiple devices. You can disable it if you find it causing trouble.
Steam is not running. I tried downloading the Steamversion (since I already own it), to see whether the problem appears there or not. Since there wasn't any difference, I switched back to the version downloaded from this site. Since Steam isn't running, cloud saves can't be the culprit.
As can be seen from the folder content, the saves have the ending ".ng1", not ".sav", but a "system.ngp1" file is there and does get rewritten on starting LoM. However, it does NOT get rewritten when I quit the game (timestamp does not update)!
This can be seen nicely from when I played for a few minutes this morning:
-rw-rw-r-- 1 <username> <username> 56812 Feb 1 08:44 quick.ng1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 <username> <username> 56240 Feb 1 08:44 start_conversation.ng1
-rw-rw-r-- 1 <username> <username> 3013 Feb 1 12:38 system.ngp1
->The quicksave quick.ngq is a few minutes newer than system.ngp1
I don't want to attach the player-prev.log (timestamp 08:45, from my test this morning), since it contains identifying information. But there aren't any errors visible. The last lines in that file are:
[ALLOC_TYPETREE] Dual Thread Allocator
Peak main deferred allocation count 0
[ALLOC_BUCKET]
Large Block size 4.0 MB
Used Block count 1
Peak Allocated bytes 4.0 MB
Failed Allocations. Bucket layout:
16B: 2 Subsections = 2048 buckets. Failed count: 12015
32B: 8 Subsections = 4096 buckets. Failed count: 145738
48B: 15 Subsections = 5120 buckets. Failed count: 27374
64B: 209 Subsections = 53504 buckets. Failed count: 167729
80B: 15 Subsections = 3072 buckets. Failed count: 3959
96B: 3 Subsections = 512 buckets. Failed count: 5487
112B: 2 Subsections = 292 buckets. Failed count: 128916
128B: 2 Subsections = 256 buckets. Failed count: 10166
[ALLOC_TYPETREE_MAIN]
Peak usage frame count: [8.0 KB-16.0 KB]: 176 frames, [16.0 KB-32.0 KB]: 671 frames
Requested Block Size 2.0 MB
Peak Block count 1
Peak Allocated memory 27.8 KB
Peak Large allocation bytes 0 B
[ALLOC_TYPETREE_THREAD]
Peak usage frame count: [32.0 KB-64.0 KB]: 176 frames, [0.5 MB-1.0 MB]: 88 frames, [1.0 MB-2.0 MB]: 583 frames
Requested Block Size 2.0 MB
Peak Block count 1
Peak Allocated memory 1.8 MB
Peak Large allocation bytes 0 B
To me it looks as if the game just fails to write out a new system.ngp1 when exiting. Maybe a game crash during shutdown?
Edit: If this is really happening due to a silent crash while shutting down, and the game only writes out a new system.ngp1 when shutting down, then isn't that really dangerous? Even without my persistent problem, it would mean that all players are at risk to lose any new achievements and unlocks if their game does not shut down cleanly (due to a power interruption, say) ...
If that is the shape of things, than I would advocate to write system.ngp1 out any time a game is saved, in addition to on game shutdown. That would pretty much guarantee consistency between global settings and save game state.
(Sorry, that's my own game developer hat speaking.)