I think I broke my SC4 installment!   First off I made the huge mistake of not backing up my city before using ilive Reader to change a couple of rail station capacities. This was my first time attempting such a thing.   Second big mistake is that I successfully changed the capacity for a rail station but did not bulldoze one of the 2 which resulted in one being 20,000 and the other 40,000 capacity while game was running. I found it strange when riots started breaking out in the city and strikes were everywhere. I was in the black making close to 40,000 a month (no cheats) and just knew I had all sliders maxed in the budgets.   After being entertained with laughter at the riots and getting them under control, I shockingly discovered all my civic sliders were set at zero. I moved the sliders back up and saved the game and exited thinking I needed to up some school capacities because I was still trying to get some low income residents back in the city to diversify the industrial zones that were turning all HT (see my inquiry in the general discussion section a few days ago) so I did not plan on putting more schools (still laughing at the riots).   As I ventured into google to find info on changing school capacities, I ran across the term "Phantom Slider Bug" and realized that is what I was experiencing. According to what I read so far, it typically happens with modded civic buildings. I did not change anything of a civic building but I thought about the train station that was not properly demolished in the city. I tried to launch SC and I got the "Bridge Flash" and nothing else. The game will not launch at all.   Am I screwed to save this region I was growing so proud of? I just made my first diagonal bridges and did some serious rail engineering.  
I takes me a long time to get momentum like this. no 2 cities will ever be the same even if I tried to duplicate what I did before (one of the things I love about SC4). So am I banished from my region never to play it again or can this be salvaged? I did make a backup of my SC_1 file though before using Reader. Does that help?