Aah!
I see, no I have no idea what Thib has done, but I have seen several people with the same issue you have.
What it was for me; I actually put .txt on the end of the file when I created it, so my file came out as user.empire_script.txt.txt (I forgot that creating a new txt by right-clicking and creating it from the new menu automatically makes it a txt file by default.)
Once I edited my user.empire_script.txt.txt to actually be user.empire_script.txt, it worked like a charm.