hi there, in the past week, ms word, wordpad and ms paint have all
disappeared off my pc programme list. and any documents/files saved in them
have been converted to something else. why would this happen?
Do you have any coworkers/family/friends who are malicious practical
jokers? That's really the only reason I can think of for that
particular selection of disappearances.
Run an antivirus scan with an up-to-date AV program.
Use Windows Explorer to search for the program files (winword.exe,
wordpad.exe, and mspaint.exe). If you find them, then probably it's
just your registry that's messed up. I can't tell you about wordpad or
paint, but you can fix Word's registry entries by going to Start > Run
and typing
winword /r
If you're running Windows XP, you can try retrieving a Restore Point
from last week or earlier.