Sorry, I think I was wrong in my post yesterday. As I dig a
little deeper in my memory now, this is what I should have said:
I have a
master .chm with only one topic,
main.htm. Other than that the master .chm is essntially
emtpy except for the links to the merged "slave" .chms, which links
can be seen in the RoboHelp TOC pane, and also are in the .hhp and
.hhc files.
While troubleshooting, I found a bad link to a remote topic
(a topic contained in one of the slave chms). It was linking to
bControl.chm::/Collections/working_with_collections.htm, but it
should have been bControl.chm::/working_with_collections.htm. I
thought this was the problem, and I fixed it.
However, (now I remember this) in working with the help
system further, it still deleted my [Merged Files] section in the
.hhp. It seems that whenever I make any changes at all to main.htm,
RoboHelp deletes the [Merged Files] section when I recompile. I
still do not know why this is happening. I have recreated my master
.chm project completely from scratch several times, but that hasn't
solved the problem.
My solution was not to change main.htm. If I ever do need to
change it, I will make the change and then delete and then re-add
all the merged links in the master project.