I had my PC running for 2 weeks prior to shutting it down to move it somewhere. When I booted it back up, I had a weird series of problems. The only unusual thing that had happened recently was at one point avast detected that a junk toolbar (spigot) had been installed and asked to remove it - I did. Not sure if that’s related. I had run the computer normally for a couple of days after that, but this is the first reboot after it.
Anyway, I put my pc back together and boot up. My wallpaper is missing, though the desktop icons are there. All of my programs pinned to the taskbar have their icons appear correctly on the task bar, but clicking on them results in a message saying something like “this item no longer exists, remove it from the task bar?”
As I re-add programs manually to the task bar, they work again.
My libraries are in a non-standard place - I wanted them off my SSD so My Music, My Documents, etc. are on my D: drive. When I opened windows explorer, and clicked libraries, it was blank. No libraries existed. I had to manually re-add them to get them to show up there. The \Users folder is in the normal place on the C drive, I just created the libraries on the D drive when I originally installed this.
Weirder, when I launch programs, they act as if I’m launching them for the first time. Lightroom asked me for my serial number, winamp had no media library at all, and thunderbird launched the wizard asking me to create an account, and all of my previously saved e-mails were lost. Other programs run the first time setup wizard if they have one, and don’t have my preferences/configurations saved.
Not every program has been affected, strangely. Windows live mail did retain my accounts and previous e-mails (separate accounts from thunderbird). So far that’s the only program I’ve noticed that’s working normally.
When I actually go digging around in the application data folder for thunderbird, the profile is either gone or overwritten. My messages file is a few kilobytes in size instead of the several hundred megabytes it should be. So it isn’t simply mislocating the user files, they’re gone. Same with the winamp media library files.
I really can’t tell what’s happening. It seems as though it isn’t reading the data that the various programs store under application data (or possibly the registry), therefore mistaking them for being run for the first time, and then overwriting the existing preferences/libraries/etc with a new copy that’s essentially blank because it’s like a first time user. So I seem to have lost my e-mail, winamp library, etc.
Does anyone have any idea what’s going on?