I've had a similar thing happen on the server that I run, with a couple of the players coming to me saying that their chars have been deleted/removed. But seeing as I'm the only one with access to the server and know I didn't do it myself I'm at a loss to explain the situation other than some sort of server bug?

Are you running a firewall? Whenever I host a game I get all kinds of hack attempts, some of them a lot more hardcore than I've seen any other time in the three years I've had a firewall up.

No you are not imagining things. Characters can become corrupted and unusable. Sometimes its caused by picking up items and having way too many and not selling them. The first indication of a problem is when you go to repair some of those items found, and the same list/price of repair keeps poping up. Sell all items immediately before switching characters. Another way is to try to switch characters in the middle of a lag storm right after beaming in found items. I've lost 5 characters on Elite due to these and various other methods which I've had the notable honor of pathfinding the way to character destruction. Be careful with 'holding' characters. If someone gives you something, require that it be repaired before you will recieve it. Never 'beam' anything in with a holding character or with any character holding in excess of about 50 items. That seems to be the stability cutoff. Hope this helps.

Sweet revenge for people being subjected to the price gouging going on for DiamondBacks. 400K for one when they're only worth 34K? Blasphemy!

BAH, those things drain to much power I'll take the Nomads

Stinger, luckily, none of my characters were used for holding class 10 weapons of any real worth. Mosly i carried quality lvl 2- 9 weapons and equipment for sale, from shields to mines, etc. All the good/non nomad stuff was held by someone else. So the price gouging continues unabated. However, due to that loss, the prices have escalated dramatically. So has the tyrranical grip on all of their locations . !m00-haha.