Recently I had a problem with Isolated Storage Settings on WP7 – the entire collection appeared to be wiped every single time I restarted the app. The problem turned out to be the deserialization stage of IsolatedStorageSettings, in essence if any object can’t be re-instantiated, then the entire collection is inaccessible. The collection will work correctly until you attempt to retrieve something that can’t be instantiated.
At the bare minimum the constructor of your class must be public.
All non-public properties will also fail to be restored, resulting in a rather empty object instance when you come to load the values that should have been saved (and have been… they just don’t come back). Be very careful with this issue, you may not notice the problem until it’s too late.
Thanks! I hope this is why mine was failing.