Can someone explain why this is happening.
It has been suggested that this is because Adobe don't actually handle .xml files very well, using the stored copy of the settings as an active file during execution time rather than a copy of it. What this means is that if anything at all happens during the run period that corrupts anything at all about the settings in memory, a corrupted version gets rewritten, and this is when you lose your presets. What is
supposed to happen is that any changes are intended to be included in the version of the file that gets rewritten during closedown, but this clearly goes wrong sometimes - randomly. So, there is no previous version to revert to, and everything gets lost. Accordingly, the only 'previous' version at all is the default - which you can restore.
Now, the foregoing may or may not be true
(I should emphasise that it was not suggested by Adobe!), although it makes a depressing amount of sense. Regardless, you are still advised to back stuff up if you value it.