Why is System Restore changing my personal folders and files?

[Martin]

It looks like System Restore is affecting my personal folders inside my
Documents folder and elsewhere, yet it says in help that "System Restore does
not affect personal files"

After a System Restore, some folders have been split into two. There are
extra folders, with the same name as an existing folder with a number
enclosed in brackets appended to the name. The extra folder's date modified
is older than the other ones, which are dated at the time the System Restore
was done.

The files have been shared out between the 2 folders. I'm not sure yet if
any have changed. The extra folder has most of the files - apparently all
files except *.ico, *.bat, *.rc2 and *.old.

Can I stop this happening? I don't want System Restore to revert files in my
Visual Studio projects to an old version!

 

[Martin]

To add to my post...

Multiple files ( hundreds of them) have vanished from some folders. I know
this because I create regular backup copies of my project folders and then
create zips from them. Comparing the zips with the backup folders, all the
differences between the two are files missing from the folder.

Files that have gone missing have extensions:
bat, pif, exe, inf, dll, sys, rc2, hlp, ico, clw, ph, cs, reg, vxd, dep,
odl, old, hhc, cnt

Files that are left behind have extensions:
dsw, opt, sln, zip, doc, jpg, bmp, cpp, h, txt, wse, wsi, log, msp, pcp, c,
vcproj, rtf, cur, dsp, rc, aps, dsw, pdf, bas, opt, obj, sbr, csv, res, ilk

There doesn't seem to be any overlap.