I got hit by one of those malware programs that pretends to be Microsoft’s antivirus program, and tells you that you need to shell out money RIGHT NOW to rescue your computer.
Didn’t shell out the dough, but did get hit pretty bad. I’ve run SUPERAntiSpyware as the first cleanup step, and think I caught the rogue program. Haven’t re-hooked the computer up to our home network yet, let alone the Web, so haven’t done any followup steps yet.
But when I boot up the computer, all I see is the toolbar at the bottom, and a black screen. My main directories (which do show up in Windows Explorer) don’t show any subdirectories.
However, the directories (and the files in them) clearly ARE there.
First of all, as SUPERAntiSpyware was cleaning everything, it showed the filenames of what it was cleaning. Maybe a few files have been killed somewhere, but by and large, everything I’d expect to find is still there.
Second, while I can’t find any of my files or directories through the directory structure, I can find them through the Search function if I know part of the filename, and I can open them and view them at that point, and the Search function shows their location in the file structure.
So everything’s still there, and the computer knows in some ways where everything is. If there’s a file on my desktop and can remember part of the name, I can do a search and find it, and it’ll tell me it’s still on the desktop. But if I think, “there’s this file on my desktop, but I can’t remember what I called it…” I’m SOL. Because I can’t see the desktop, and if I could find the ‘Desktop’ folder, it would tell me it’s empty.
So is there a straightforward way to get Windows to reassociate files with their directories, and directories with their subdirectories and vice versa, given that it has that knowledge in parts of its brain? Or do I have to do a reinstall of Windows? (Vista, in this case.)
Thanks in advance for your suggestions.