1. don't panic
2. take a deep breath
3. do what jommy said:
Remember to backup the (corrupted) wallet just in case.
Then place one of your backups in said directory and rename it wallet.dat
backups will take some 100 transactions before going out of sync, so you're probably good with your latest backup.
Anyway don't panic, if you have your backups, you're 99% fine.
Thank YOU jommy and mtrycz. It might be working. It appears to be automatically syncing in classic mode. Thank YOU more than mere words can express.
No problem, man
The moment you said you had backups I knew you were golden. It's not like you had an ssd failure or something xD
I do not know exactly how to put this, and I hope it doesn't confuse anyone, but I had a helluva time winning this battle. But, with your help, somehow I prevailed. I got everything where it belonged in the folder yet it was still all chingered up. I even downloaded the 3.0.2.0 again. Nothing. I did indeed have everything right in the %appdata% folder, but I had renamed my backup data "wallet.dat" ~ I remember noticing that when I downloaded the new 3.0.2 it only had "wallet" listed. I took off the .dat from my backup and it just all popped into place. I do not exactly get it. I don't have to. I got my wallet back. It's a true testimonial to THIS GREAT COMMUNITY and how necessary it is to backup, backup, backup. And I also learned, when or if you ever change your encrypted password, that all the backups with the old password will be rendered useless. You may know all of this, I realize. But, if a rookie like me can do this, ANYONE can do it. OMG and a half. I just HAS to be a sign of good things to come, damnit!
Happy to hear you are back in business with your Pandacoin Bank and Balances! I am guessing your file explorer view settings are the windows default and don't show file extensions for known file types (I forget about this since I change it right away so I always see my file type extensions like .dat .txt etc). Your wallet.dat was most likely wallet.dat without the .dat showing then you renamed it wallet.dat.dat which looked to you as wallet.dat, I don't know why they default to hiding such a key bit of information. If you were not able to get that to work there is also the final option to run your Pandacoin Bank / Wallet with a command line parameter -salvagewallet to extract your Private key from a problem wallet.dat