lost all playlists, and nothing from ml shows up in list pane when clicked in ml
 

I just upgraded to 5.581. WOrked fine for about 2 hours, then in the middle of a CD rip, I got the "unexpected error , must close" message. Didn't really think too much about it, because it's happened before with no permanent problem.

Restarted Winamp, and noticed I had no playlists anymore, and whenever I click on anything under local media,i.e. audio , video, recently added, etc., or the local media button itself, the large pane to the left is gray/blank.

Everything else seems to be working properly.

The first time I used winamp5581_pro_all.exe

I found another pro download for upgrade and tried it, as well:winamp_pro_en-us.exe

Installed this one and had the same problem.

Wassupwiddat?:confused:

Urghhh, sounds nasty.... :-(

If switching to eg. the Video tab and back to ML doesn't fix it,
then alas it sounds as though your Media Library database has become corrupted, or partially deleted.

For future reference, we recommend to use the Winamp Backup Tool on a regular basis
so you can make backups (settings, playlists, mldb, everything) that you can restore at any point later.

Go to the %AppData\Winamp folder
Then go into the Plugins\ml subfolder

Do you see any .m3u8 playlist files in there?

If yes, then you can just re-import these via:
Winamp -> Media Library -> Playlists -> Import button -> Import playlists from folder

As you didn't provide a List of Plugins, or details of what your Windows OS is,
I can't tell you the exact path to %AppData%\Winamp

If the playlists don't show even after re-importing,
then close Winamp
and delete the playlists.xml file in the %AppData%\Winamp\Plugins\ml folder
then re-open Winamp and try reimporting the playlists again.

For the grey local media views....

FAQ

Grey/blank Local Media views in Media Library
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=304613
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=306117

You'll need to delete the main.idx file then reimport your music :-(