starting a new agent with old persistent data

[Dave Mason]

Hi,
We have a problem with restarting an agent with old persistence data. 
 Am I right in assuming that the persistence files are just the object 
values written sequentially?  That would explain why, if we add an 
object to a MIB and rebuild the agent, object values contain garbage 
when we restart.  The strange thing is, we have a problem now where we 
can rebuild and run an agent, with the only MIB change being a new 
default value for an existing object, and garbage values get loaded. 
 Maybe there is something else affecting the data that gets read.

We're still using agent++ v3.5.3a and snmp++ v3.1.6c with no other 
observed problems.  Has the persistence mechanism changed since then? 
 Ideally it should try to match up object values with OIDs.  On restart 
it should ignore values for missing OIDs or use a default value for a 
new OID that's not in the file.

Regards,
Dave