Something happened to make my programs clear out and start over

[Surtlab]

Something happened to my pc. I woke it up and all of my programs are in
virgin state as if never used. I have no pictures in my pictures
folder, no music in music folder, outlook express has no saved mail,
limewire acts like its never been used, itunes has none of my music.
Now, I can do a search and find my pictures and my songs, but songs
won't play and don't know how to get pictures back in pictures folder
or songs back to itunes.
I've ran all of my virus scan and spyware, all seems to be clear.
System restore doesn't work, it always tells me that no changes have
been made to restore to.
In the search field, the photos and the music, say they are in
c:documents and settings/owner/shared/my pictures or my music, but
they arent' in there when I click on the icons in start button.
I am lost and confused as to what happened, why and how I fix it...

 

[Guest]

Hi,
I'm sorry to piggyback on your post, but I have the same or similar problem.
Here is a post I put on the Dell Forum:
Hi,
I have a freaky problem, I'll try to make it brief but explicit.
I had an application installed (PreEmpt) that I wanted to get rid of but it
did not want to uninstall normally (file in use), so I booted to Safe Mode
and completed the deleting/uninstalling. I am the only user of the Dell
Inspiron 8100 on which this problem occurred, but when I signed into 'safe
mode', of the two user accounts I have, I signed in as Administrator. When
all deleting/uninstalling was complete, I booted, but when WinXP Home SP2
loaded the Desktop that displayed was as if I had booted for the very first
time after doing a reinstall in Jun.’06 (M$ bliss wallpaper, the My Documents
and My Recent Documents were empty, etc. Very, very few icons were visible
and there were 'clouds' asking if I wanted to tour WinXP and the Dell Support
cloud was there too. I checked some of my files and the most recent I could
find was Jun.’06. However, WinXP SP2 is completely up-to-date(?). IE7 was
installed and functional – I just installed this in early March. There was no
Outlook icon available and I had to use Program Files to launch it, ubt as I
did the install wizard deployed. Some applications were missing but the ones
that were there were up-to-date.
I immediately did a Virus Scan, which was negative and PestPatrol. I have
Norton GoBack, but the ONLY choice available was today(?) when you use GoBack
you have to disable system restore. Does anyone have any idea what happened
here?
How can I get back to my normal Desktop with my personal settings?
Thank you.

 

[Surtlab]

This is what I found out so far from a reply on another forum:
I went to C:\documents and settings and found my original owner an
another new one. I found most of my stuff in the original owner fil
so this is what I'm told what to do. Haven't done it yet but wil
later and post again.....

Reply from another forum:

Inside the original owner profile you will find your my documents
pictures and so on. Move them into the corresponding folders in the ne
owner profile. That will restore them back where they should be. You ca
also do this with your desktop icons (located in the original owne
"desktop" folder).

To restore your .dbx outlook express folders, follow this useful lin
here... http://www.insideoutlookexpress.com/faqs/how.htm#importdbx)

This will explain a nice simple way of getting them back into outloo
express. I would recommend moving the .dbx files into something like m
documents and repointing outlook express to them. This can be done wit
the instructions here

As for the sound, I am not sure. Sort this lot out above first. Don'
tackle all the problems at once, you won't get anywhere. Knock eac
problem off the list before tackling another