Beth, I know this is going to sound silly, but that used to happen to my all the time over at Jet Noise when we were using TypePad.

I got into the habit of keeping Word open while I was posting. Just before I'd hit Preview, I would just select all my text and copy and paste it into Word.

It only takes a second, but since I've so incredibly verbose, it beats working on a long post for an hour and then losing all your work.

Now that I'm on MType and Hosting Matters, I hardly ever lose a post, but if it's a long post, I still (as a matter of course) copy my post to the Windows clipboard before hitting Preview or post. At the very least, that way I can paste it back if I need to if I lose my connection.

You may already have thought of it, but just thought I'd mention it.

Cassandra seems to have gotten here first. Yeah, a royal pain it is to lose a post... all that lovely work - pfft! gone. *sigh*

I would be a bit careful about saving the post in Word though. I guess it's okay if you don't save it as a doc file, but as txt instead. Only because Word tends to add wonky stuff to the file. Just preview carefully.

I hope you can find the problem and get it fixed!

Useta do the same thing, with Notepad, back when I was at blog-city. I should probably still do it for the long essay posts, just because the editing's easier.