I did try to do the repair to no avail. Subsequent alerts after that time appeared fine until today. Now every alert preview is as shown in my original post. Just now, I tried the 3 steps you stated above which left me with no previews at all even though the db folder appears to have a *,dat file for each alert after BI rebuilt from scratch. In all the years I have used BI I have never seen this before. Guess I need to talk to BI support