Spontaneous Reversion to Factory Settings?

[J.Jack.J.]

Disastrous thing seems to have happened last night -- when I shut
down, the system seems to have gone into some mode whereby it
spontaneously reverted to factory settings. It took a very long time
going through a reconfiguration process -- I thought it was just
installing updates.
My applications seem still to be here, but not properly installed. For
example, my Bookmarks on Firefox seem to have disappeared. My desktop
files and folders are missing. I did a search for one of them but
nothing turned up. Do you think I have lost them? Why has my system
done this?
With thanks in advance.

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

Disastrous thing seems to have happened last night -- when I shut
down, the system seems to have gone into some mode whereby it
spontaneously reverted to factory settings. It took a very long time
going through a reconfiguration process -- I thought it was just
installing updates.
My applications seem still to be here, but not properly installed. For
example, my Bookmarks on Firefox seem to have disappeared. My desktop
files and folders are missing. I did a search for one of them but
nothing turned up. Do you think I have lost them? Why has my system
done this?
With thanks in advance.

Too many possibilities to give a clear-cut answer...

Hard drive crash
Malware
Corruption of one or two system files
Bad RAM, even

I'm sure there are more possibilities than I can think of.

There are people here who know a lot more than I do. Perhaps they will
ask you for more details, if you can possibly provide them.

If you can get to one of the antivirus websites, some of them have free
on-line malware scans - I forget which ones, sorry. You could search for
them - Avira, AVG, etc, preferably from another uncorrupted computer.

If you can remove your hard drive, you could connect it to a USB dock on
another (uncorrupted) computer and scan it for malware.

You could run chkdsk on the drive in place or on another computer.

The are memory test programs built in to Windows 7 (I'm not sure if it
was already in Vista) or available for free download (memtest86, DrMem
come to mind).

There is System Restore and there is a repair option on the Safe Mode
boot screen.

If you have the OS disks, there is the possibility of a Repair
installation.

Clearly, what is most needed is a way to zero in on the problem (which
is what you wanted, yes?).

 

[Andrew Rossmann]

(e-mail address removed)>, (e-mail address removed)
says...

Disastrous thing seems to have happened last night -- when I shut
down, the system seems to have gone into some mode whereby it
spontaneously reverted to factory settings. It took a very long time
going through a reconfiguration process -- I thought it was just
installing updates.
My applications seem still to be here, but not properly installed. For
example, my Bookmarks on Firefox seem to have disappeared. My desktop
files and folders are missing. I did a search for one of them but
nothing turned up. Do you think I have lost them? Why has my system
done this?
With thanks in advance.

Sounds like your use profile was corrupted and Windows created a new
one. Some of the data may still be there, but in a different user
folder?

 

[Joe Morris]

(e-mail address removed) says...

Sounds like your use profile was corrupted and Windows created a new
one. Some of the data may still be there, but in a different user
folder?

I've seen (very) occasional situations in both Vista and Win7 in which a
user logs on but is given a "temporary" profile for no obvious reason. I
strongly suspect a race condition but since it's very rare occurrence and a
logoff/logon always returns the user to the correct profile I've never been
able to chase down what's happening.

Question for the OP: have you tried a logoff/logon? Rebooting? If so and
you still have the new profile then your problem isn't the one I've
experienced.

Incidentally, what you describe is *not* reversion to factory settings.
Were that the case you would have lost applications you've installed, and
(assuming that you created and used a new userid and/or changed the
password) you could not have logged in. As Andrew noted, it's most likely
that you were given a temporary profile so your personalizations were
missing, but all the applications are present (and properly installed if
they were properly installed before this problem happened.

Try looking at the event logs; I would expect that there would be some entry
created when you logged in and first saw the problem.

Joe Morris

 

[J.Jack.J.]

I've seen (very) occasional situations in both Vista and Win7 in which a
user logs on but is given a "temporary" profile for no obvious reason.  I
strongly suspect a race condition but since it's very rare occurrence anda
logoff/logon always returns the user to the correct profile I've never been
able to chase down what's happening.

This is what it was.
WIth thanks.