My wife used our home computer yesterday morning. We have a password to get

into Windows XP Home edition as an administrator, and we have no other

accounts. I used the computer an hour before her and it worked fine. She

doesn't remember exactly what happened, but when she went to log on, she

thinks it gave her an error message and then loaded the desktop. The desktop

did not have all of our icons on it, and the picture we used for the

wallpaper was gone, and replaced by the generic one it had when we bought the

computer. She rebooted the computer to try to get our settings back. The

windows password worked fine (and still does), but our icons our still

missing, we cannot find our pictures we had saved, our word documents are

gone, our downloaded music is gone, and our favorites and default home page

on internet explorer are all gone. The default home page is also the one we

had when we bought our computer. When we go to Start, then all programs, we

still have all of the programs we had before the problem occurred. I ran a

virus scan and it said there were none. I tried a system restore and it said

it did not restore because there had been no changes made. Please help me!

Go to control panel/user accounts and see if she accidentally created a new

user account.......if she did the old default administrator acct that you

were using went into "hiding".its still there just hidden and only

accessible by going into safe mode.

If this is the case you can "copy and paste" the admin settings into this

new account under Windows Explorer...its location is usually the C drive

under Documents&settings/user name

By right clicking the start button and then explore all user it takes you to

the location.....look for that new user

If that is not the case get back to us

peter

"Brandon" <Brandon@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message

news:0CBAD4A6-28EE-4CFA-B5CB-C5A680C1F1D2@microsoft.com...

> My wife used our home computer yesterday morning. We have a password to

> get

> into Windows XP Home edition as an administrator, and we have no other

> accounts. I used the computer an hour before her and it worked fine. She

> doesn't remember exactly what happened, but when she went to log on, she

> thinks it gave her an error message and then loaded the desktop. The

> desktop

> did not have all of our icons on it, and the picture we used for the

> wallpaper was gone, and replaced by the generic one it had when we bought

> the

> computer. She rebooted the computer to try to get our settings back. The

> windows password worked fine (and still does), but our icons our still

> missing, we cannot find our pictures we had saved, our word documents are

> gone, our downloaded music is gone, and our favorites and default home

> page

> on internet explorer are all gone. The default home page is also the one

> we

> had when we bought our computer. When we go to Start, then all programs,

> we

> still have all of the programs we had before the problem occurred. I ran

> a

> virus scan and it said there were none. I tried a system restore and it

> said

> it did not restore because there had been no changes made. Please help

> me!

>

One thing that doesn't sound right is there being no restore point....

unless it's been turned off in Control panel / Performance & Maintenance

and then to System, you'll see the Restore tab top left.

 

If you open the C drive can you see any related documents or folders

etc, I was leading to the thought that a different profile might have

been created or used. If this is the case then you should still see the

items there.

 

Another thought was if when shutting the computer down you didn't

allow it to 'Save your settings' prior to switching the main power off

at the wall socket.

 

Files and folder's don't just disappear unless something serious has

happened.

 

Davy