Hi there. Something bad just happened to my computer and some stuff was lost. I can get FFvTR and FFX3 to run but it doesn't acknowledge any of my old custom characters. I can, of course, re-create them one by one, but does anyone have any insights into where my old character.dat (which I assume is what's missing) might be hiding?
Your custom character files are not stored in characters.dat, the built-in characters are. See the Game FAQ (http://freedomreborn.net/archive/index.php?topic=41006.msg572258#msg572258) for information on where your custom characters are normally stored.
Sorry to hear about your crash. If your can grab the files from your old custom character folder and pop the into your new one, you should have most of them intact, though you may want to try and copy over your old ffxcustom.py from ..\ffx3\Missions\Scripts if you have lots of FFX customizations on your custom heroes.