backup wallet should work fine, it can take a while. On occasion, some people have had to hit the "reload blockchain" under the "file" menu. The extra 5000 coins may be due to interest earned even though you haven't actively staked. I'm not sure how the algo works exactly, but from my experience you seem to earn interest whether or not you stake. My wallet was offline by accident for about four weeks and when I got it back online to start staking again, my block rewards were initially A LOT higher for a few days. So I speculate that even though I wasn't staking for a month, my overall accrued interest seemed unchanged.
Can't remember the figures, but IIRC the staking rewards are based on an annual interest assuming the wallet was staking all year. When it goes offline for a while, the next interest payment(s) will be higher to 'catch up' to the annual rewards... or something. lol
Just a bit confused that there is no record of the transaction in my history, and there are no coins in my staking amount either. Does anyone have access to peers.dat and solarcoin.conf for comparison?
Cheers for the help!
AFAIK (but I haven't had enough motivation to look at the code that closely) what happens is that if your wallet is offline for a period your coins 'recover' from being staked and 'freshen', if you will. When the wallet gets back online, all those 'fresh' coins are valid for staking. So until all those 'fresh' coins have their moment in the sun (stake pool) - and generate staking rewards - you get a one time boost. Once a coin has been staked, it then goes back in the pot to be freshened again. The only thing that makes this 'freshening' happen is time.
If you are really bored and have some free time from watching paint dry, grass grow etc, you can see this happening on the 'staked' line of the wallet home page. This is also apparent if you bring up a second copy of the wallet with a 'old/unused for a time' copy of the wallet.dat. There is a surge in POS rewards that are never actually validated (and eventually disappear) as the extra copy generates rewards from what it thinks are 'fresh' coins. The blockchain knows better though and rejects them as duplicates?. This is a 'nice' (in the proper sense) piece of code in the wallet core. It is also the reason that it doesn't help running a second copy of the same wallet.
That is my understanding at least. If anyone has a better explaination I would be keen to read it.
T