Windows 7 update seems to have caused a few problems

[Debatewise]

I woke up yesterday morning (1st April – around 7am GMT) to find my PC had rebooted itself with lots of changes made. These include

• Desktop settings changed – new wallpaper, all programs previously pinned to taskbar lost
• MS Word had lost all preferences – had to sign-in as new users (giving full name and initials), recently used file list empty, default font changed from mine to Times. Same is true for Excel and Powerpoint
• Cute FTP settings lost – no list of sites in site manager, all passwords gone.
• iTunes settings lost, all files moved to /users/Dave/My Music/iTunes – which is not the default iTunes folder
• All documents move to /users/Dave/My Documents – and not visible in Libraries/Documents

In fact, writing it down makes me realise this may well be a settings issue. I don’t seem to have lost files but all the settings have either been deleted or moved.

Has anyone else experienced this? Should I be concerned at all about some kind of hijack? I’m pretty sure Microsoft Security Essentials was turned on.

Thanks

 

[yowanvista]

Do a system restore

 

[Debatewise]

Thanks, I'd actually forgotten I could do that.

However, I was also interested to know if this was a rare occurrance. I haven't seen word of it elsewhere and given the severity of changes would have thought this would have been bigger news had it happened to more people.

Which means the slightly paranoid part of me wants to know whether this could have been caused by some kind of machine hijack?

 

[Debatewise]

What it seems to have done is create a new user called TEMP which is now the default user folder. There are no files actually in TEMP, though the directory structure is the same as my own user folder.

 

[Debatewise]

Fixed one problem, caused another. I did a bit more reading around and learned that a simple log-off and on usually cleared this problem. And it did.

Only problem is I'd moved my iTunes folder into what I thought was /users/Dave/iTunes - however, it's not actually there, it's not in the TEMP users folder (there is no more TEMP user) and the files don't seem to be anywhere on my machine. In fact, I've got 130Gb more space than I used to.

Now I do have an online backup so can restore from that if needs be. But I don't really fancy downloading 130Gb if I can avoid it.

Any idea if these files are still around somewhere and how they might be recovered? They're not in the recycle bin.