A few weeks/months ago I was reporting HTTrack to 
be 'spontaneously' deleting the hts-log.txt files it 
was creating, leaving me with 0-byte logs after a 
crawl.

Recently I've changed the way I use HTTrack, and it 
seems to have made a difference (unless the problem 
was a bug that got silently fixed).

Old way I used WinHTTrack: I'd mirror site after site 
without exiting HTTrack between them.  Sometimes the 
log files would end up as zero-byte files.
New way I use WinHTTrack: I exit HTTrack after each 
crawl, and open a new, fresh instance of it for every 
subsequent crawl.  After any given crawl completes, I 
consistently do the following:
1. view log in HTTrack, looking at Errors.
2. click Finish
3. click Exit

Then I'll open a new copy of WinHTTrack for the next 
crawl.

Doing this for the last few weeks appears to have 
stopped the logs from 'randomly' disappearing.  I must 
add that I've been testing on Win2k recently, only.  
My earlier problems were seem on mostly Win95 and 
Win98 machines, and possibly Win2k machines.  I'm 
pretty sure the problem lies in WinHTTrack, but I had 
to mention that other variable.

-Haudy Kazemi