<p>To make it harder to relate your different transactions, you should use a different receiving address for each transaction. <span class="application">Electrum</span> automatically generates new addresses for you to use.</p>
<p>Do not blindly trust the bitcoin balance that <span class="application">Electrum</span> displays as <em>unconfirmed</em>. Wait for transactions to be confirmed.</p>
Your wallet can be recovered entirely from its <em>seed</em>: the chain of words generated by <span class="application">Electrum</span> when creating the wallet. But if you lose your seed, you lose your entire wallet.
If <span class="application">Electrum</span> fails to start or stays minimized, maybe your <span class="application">Electrum</span> folder is corrupted.