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[Angry Pierre]

I'm not sure why smoke keeps popping up in my fort.

The first time I saw smoke was in my workshop room. I hadn't installed the magma furnace yet, and it was centered around my stonecraft workshop (not the wood furnace). I've only butchered a small number of animals, and each time I butcher something, the room got flooded with smoke (is this normal). I don't recall the other instances, but it seems like smoke randomly appears every now and then and then goes away without any indication of what caused it or damage. Except for this last time.

One of my soldiers went into my food stockpile which has been filled with smoke for quite some time (I can't remember when it started, but my save happened only seconds before this incident, so I can't trace it back). He comes out on fire and then bleeds to death. I examined each tile in the stockpile, and I see no suspicious objects.

My questions are:
a) Is smoke always indicative of fire?
b) Does fire show up when I examine a tile?
c) Any idea how this smoke and possibly fire is getting generated?

This is from DF Wiki:
"A touch warm" means that, when eaten, Fire Imp meat will cause a flurry of cancelled jobs as dwarves rush for beverages instead.

My soldier's death seems a lot more extreme than this, but could this possibly be related?
I have killed 2 fire imps (one may have been butchered), and I've got guards stationed around the other two which are floating around the magma pipe.

This is my first post, so I'll ask my two other noob questions:
d) Every time I save and quit, there is about a 1/3 chance that the game crashes. I have not fiddled with save folders, and I am running Vista. Any ideas about the cause or the cure?
e) Why won't my dwarves carry metal bolts? I have forbidden all bolts but metal, changed weapons in [m] to get them to swap out and back into crossbow, have dumped all wooden bolts, and read the relevant DF wiki articles. One of the three pulled his head out of his ass and picked up steel bolts, but one has a crossbow and no bolts (at least they aren't in his quiver or displayed in the inventory) and the third is using wooden again (I took them off forbidden since my earlier frustration for training). They are all on duty.

[Dwarf fort 27]

Are they flies?

[Angry Pierre]

Are they flies?

No. I'm pretty sure in the first two that I inspected them. I'm not positive though (there were more than 30 tiles grey though, so I'm pretty sure it was smoke).

The third is definitely smoke.

[Angry Pierre]

Update: At the center of the smoke is a XBarrelX. I haven't seen X as a quality modifier before, and as it presumably burned more, it changed to XXBarrelXX. So now I'm pretty sure there's a fire in my food stockpile, but I have no idea how it got there.

Edit: If you read my previous edit, ignore it. I'm not sure what the X's are about, but now I found several !!!!!Barrel!!!!!, so now I'm positive its fire.

[CognitiveDissonance]

Could it be a nasty fire snake?

[Angry Pierre]

Could it be a nasty fire snake?

I don't see any around. Can they get through both grates and fortifications?

If not, then they would have had to crawl about a screen and a half to my entrance, but I've never seen them wander more than 6 or 7 tiles from the magma pipe.

[Jim Groovester]

It's likely that you butchered a fire imp, and that its fat or meat or whatever made it to your food stockpile. There, its temperature, which is about as hot as magma, set everything alight.

Forbid everything in your food stockpile and lock the door. Let it all burn away before you decide to go back in there.

As for your other questions:

d) Vista causes problems. Supposedly the problem is that when you've got your DF folder in Program Files, Vista decides to chop up your data and store it in different locations for some reason, and this will crash your game. Move the DF folder to somewhere else. I have it on my desktop, and I haven't had any problems with it.

e) Try making some quivers. They should put metal bolts in there.

[Angry Pierre]

It's likely that you butchered a fire imp, and that its fat or meat or whatever made it to your food stockpile. There, its temperature, which is about as hot as magma, set everything alight.

Forbid everything in your food stockpile and lock the door. Let it all burn away before you decide to go back in there.

As for your other questions:

d) Vista causes problems. Supposedly the problem is that when you've got your DF folder in Program Files, Vista decides to chop up your data and store it in different locations for some reason, and this will crash your game. Move the DF folder to somewhere else. I have it on my desktop, and I haven't had any problems with it.

e) Try making some quivers. They should put metal bolts in there.

Thanks for the all the help.

The fire was so slow that I just walled off that 1/3 of the food pile and locked the door, and I'll try moving my folder.

So, let me get this straight:
The dwarf soldiers will not grab an empty quiver and put metal bolts in it, however, if there is a quiver with  metal bolts in it, then they will select these before wooden/bone bolts when on duty?

[Jim Groovester]

Well, technically speaking, they don't grab quivers with metal bolts in them. They grab the quivers first, which are pretty much always empty, and then they stuff metal bolts in them.

But yes, they will try to keep a stack of metal ammunition in their quivers, and any practice ammunition they'll lug around with their hands, I believe.

I'm not exactly an authority on this, since I've only recently started to use ranged attackers.

[CognitiveDissonance]

I still say consider the possibility of a fire snake.
They are vermin, and as such able to teleport through everything, including solid walls.

And I've read that they can, in fact, set booze alight, so I'd expect the same with food storage.
Maybe you need more cats Or, you could set animal traps around there and extract the precious fire juices.

[Elvang]

My current fort is in a emptied magma pool, so fire snakes galore. I've had them destroy at least 50 wooden food and booze barrels (no explosions yet, year 12), all sorts of wood crafts including a wooden artifact, and unfortunately a wooden cage full of terrifying goblins (fun). IIRC cats can't/won't catch fire snakes and in my experience this is true, have yet to see a single fire snake corpse in my refuse pile.