Avatar/Save detection issues

[Agro, Died, Etc]

I know it's been asked and somewhat answered several times before, but my game has decided to not let me load any of my characters anymore, and any new characters that get made will disappear off the list the moment I go and log off of them and try to reload.

Now I know where the saves are located, and I've looked at the avatar listing text file, which is only listing the latest character I've made but will no longer let me pick to load, and I've tried to readd my other characters to the text file, along with taking their backup saves and throwing them into the normal save folder, but I can't load up ANY of my characters still.

I feel there needs to be a proper answer to this problem that isn't simply telling people there are files somewhere and you just gotta figure out what to do with them. I would really like a solution to this.

[Agro, Died, Etc]

Well, I don't know what actually caused the game to stop reading my saves, and despite it having everything set up to actually read at least one character save, it wasn't doing that. I've gotten it fixed at this point, and I have to at least say for anyone in the future, remember this.

Go through to the save folder and make sure there's HL1 and HL2 files for each of your avatars in the save folder, if not then check the backup folder and copy them over to the save folder. And check the avatar list text file, and any names it's missing, put them in as they are written within the avatar save text files, including capitalization.
And the avatar list file actually handles separation of names by semicolon, so enter each of avatar names in the format of:
Avatarname1;Avatarname2;Avatarname3;Avatar etc;whateveravatar

It's a pain in the ass when there's no proper documentation or archive to properly reference this stuff, but I hope it helps.