"Andrew Rossmann" <andysnewsreply@no_junk.comcast.net> wrote:
> 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?
> 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
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