XP Reset Itself - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

May 16, 2007 7:29 AM

I woke up last Saturday morning to find that my WinXP machine has reset itself to settings from a year ago.

The background image is the old one, all the menus have reverted back, Warcraft was no longer updated properly, and most distressingly: Everything in the MyDocs folder is gone!

Is there any way to fix this?

posted by Irontom to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Check your system restore, see if you can do a restore back to how it was.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:43 AM on May 16, 2007

your mydocs folder doesn't disappear, so i'm guessing that you're probably not logged on as 'you' anymore. try starting to shut down but instead of selecting 'shut down' select 'log off' and log back in as your real user.

you can check the c:\documents & settings folder - you should be able to see the various user accounts on your machine and potentially even get at your my documents folder without logging out (depending on permissions).
posted by noloveforned at 8:22 AM on May 16, 2007

It's possible that your local profile for your user has become corrupted or otherwise unusable and so Windows has created a temporary user profile. If you look in C:\Documents and Settings as noloveforned mentioned do you see a folder named TEMP? If that's the case then it's the My Documents folder in that TEMP user directory that you're seeing and your documents are still all in the user directory for your actual user. When this happened on my wife's laptop recently, logging off and logging back on didn't help since it always kept using the TEMP user directory instead of her actual one. This article has a number of steps you can take to fix it, the first one being to use the System Restore tool, which worked in our case.
posted by shinji_ikari at 11:19 AM on May 16, 2007

What shinji_ikari describes sounds a lot like what happened to my just before my last hard drive died.
posted by 4ster at 5:30 PM on May 16, 2007