Hi, PT.
HOW are you Exiting Quicken? And then, HOW are you launching it again? In Quicken, what do you see when you click File and look at the list just above Exit? You should see the list of your most recently used Quicken files, and both PERS and CORP should be in that list. Click CORP, let it load, and then close Quicken. Now start Quicken again. That CORP file should be loaded automatically. Now click PERS, let it load, and repeat. Now PERS should be #1 on that list and CORP should be #2. Is that what you see?
In my case, I have only my one RC.qdf, so I don't have much experience with multiple filesets. Generally, when I'm finished with a session, I first do one more manual backup (Ctrl+B) to my QBAK folder. Then I just click the X in the red corner. To restart, I click the Quicken icon in my Quick Launch and it starts, with my RC.qdf file loaded. RC.qdf is #1 on my MRU list. In fact, it's the ONLY one one that list. My several backups are not shown there at all.
Another way to start Quicken with my file loaded, of course, is to right-click on Program Files\Quicken\RC.qdf and choose to Open with... Quicken, or to Create a Shortcut on my Desktop. That hasn't been necessary for me, but either way should work.
In the Backup dialog, I never use the "add the date to the filename" option. And, of course, there is not even an option to change the name of the current file there, except to add the date. The only option is to put the current file, with the current filename, into a different folder - perhaps on a USB flash drive or another hard drive.
There is a subtle but important difference between a backup and an archive. In my mind, a backup is needed only for a short time. It's hard for me to imagine a time when I would need or want to reload my July 1994 backup, just to think up a wild date for example. I'm not likely ever to need my July 7,
2009, backup after today, since my current 07/08/09 (just had to get that remarkable date in somewhere ) file is in good shape. To me, a backup is needed ONLY until I've verified that I'm not likely ever to need it again. If I haven't detected an error in my automatic backups before they scroll off after 5 weeks, I probably won't find one that an old backup would fix. And if my hard drive dies overnight, then I know right away that I need the backup from yesterday, not one from a month ago!
An archive is something else; I MIGHT have occasion to reload my 2007 TurboTax file some day, so there are multiple copies of that both on and off the computer hard drive. In fact, I still have the original TurboTax media for each year back to about 1990 or so, along with the data files for those years. (All I have to do is find them and see if they will run on today's computer.) Yes, I'm a confirmed packrat.
RC