All files 'hidden' attribute set

Greetings,

I'm a first time poster here as I'm a new user of Win7, so please excuse my ignorance if I am being a moron, but I have a strange problem!!

For the past week or so, ALL of my files on desktop and in every folder have turned translucent. When I checked properties, the hidden attribute has been set. However this includes my special Libraries icons (Pictures, Music etc).

Fair enough, I could simply go and manually unset the hidden property via DOS or Properties on the root C: folder, but this will be time consuming on a 640GB hard drive and it still won't answer why it happened in the first place.

My first step was to perform an Antivirus scan which found nothing, then a malware scan which only picked up an infestation of 31 Relevant Knowledge files/registry entries. It tells me these are all now all removed but my icons are still "hidden".

I have just done a test run to unset H on my C:\users\username folder (which required administrator privaleges to run) and it seems to have done the trick on folder and file icons, but my special Libraries icons are still translucent, and when I right click I don't get the usual properties dialog to unset the hidden attribute.

After days of googling, I can't find anyone with a similar story for an explanation of why this may have happened, if it will happen again, if there are any other underlying issues/threats that are not obvious to me, or if I'm just being a numpty.

In addition to this, around the same time but probably totally unrelated, my Chrome Shockwave Flash has crashed and have unsuccessfully uninstalled and reinstalled to no avail and I have now been forced to resort to using IE !

If anyone has any ideas, feel free to divulge.

Ciao fur now.

I apologize that this is a late reply to this thread, but I wanted to offer a solution that worked for me while having the same issue with Windows XP. All of my files were hidden after a virus. I did a System Restore from Safe Mode and everything appeared fine afterward. Hope this helps someone.

J

To SledgeDG tried your method & got access denied all directories (MS message on Users directory).
I have no visibility on one user directory (under C:\Users) and it has removed associated icons on desktop. (Weird uh?)

Yes I used the elevated command prompt, but not as an administrator on my son's user side. Which I believe it should of asked for a user name and password that never happened. Glitch in the system may be, don't know. I decided to restore "Windows 7" successfully. I was able to get his user files back. I did however lose at least one desktop short cut to the internet. First time I was able to use restore successfully. I tried it on my Gateway Vista several times with no luck, but that's another story.
Thanks a million for your support now know a short cut to cdm.exe .