Bitcoin Forum

So I had some BTC on an older Windows computer with an old version of the BTC client, 0.3.x.    It was crashing on me after a minute or so of being open, and I kept restarting it and finally sent all my BTC to an address of a wallet I had stored on another computer

I closed the bitcoin client that was buggy/crashing on me right after sending the coins.   I backed up the wallet.dat and moved it to a computer with a working (latest) version of the bitcoin client.  It was fully synced up with the blockchain before overwriting the wallet.dat.  When I launched the client it showed my transaction in the tx list but it was 0/confirmed, and still is (this is about a week after sending the coins).  The balance is 0 so the coins are out there 'in limbo' and blockchain.info doensn't have any record of the transaction and they never arrived at the destination

what do?

nevermind, it looks like it is now starting to get confirmations.   :)
so I guess you shouldn't send BTC and immediately close the client or it might never start getting confirmed..?

The client will notice that it isn't getting confirmed and will eventually (e.g., in a half hour or less) rebroadcast  the transaction.   It will keep doing this (checking and sending about every half hour) until it does eventually get confirmed.    Obviously, if the program isn't running it can't perform this check.  But you'll never lose this transaction ...  with the exception where from another copy of the same wallet you might end up doing a double spend of the coins that this poorly transmitted transaction was also using.