So I show up to work, sign on with my username, and as it's booting I can see a window that mentions something like "desktop update" or maybe "updating desktop"....something to that effect.

Now all of the icons that I ever had placed on the desktop are gone.

Also, it's like I'm a brand new user as my preferences for IE and Firefox have all, apparently, been trashed.

All installed programs still exist but their respective shortcuts are missing.

My outlook calendar has been completely wiped too. (I really relied on that thing to keep things straight around here...).

My computer was never effected by any work-related updates before since I'm on a separate network. No one's ever even been able to remote in. (They still shouldn't since I don't have it enabled).

I was here until 5:30 yesterday so it's highly unlikely that anyone came over and updated anything physically, anyway.

So how did this happen? Is this some sort of MS update? I'm one of 2 administrators on this computer and I'm 99% sure that the other guy wasn't here yesterday and/or last night.

XP?

yep.

What's the value for HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\policies\Explorer\NoDesktop?

Try 0 if it's anything but 0.

Under policies, the only choices are:

Ext
--->CSLID
NonEnum
Ratings
System

No "explorer" to be found.

Your old profile was probably corrupted and a new one was created when you logged in this morning.

bassness wrote:Your old profile was probably corrupted and a new one was created when you logged in this morning.

I think this is exactly what happened. What constitutes a "corrupted" profile though? I'm assuming it's one that doesn't match some sort of user-template or something. Obviously, I don't really know.

However, there's a nurse here who also uses this computer (only as a Power User, though, which is kinda weird) and she logged on to the VPN yesterday which gave "them" access to the whole C: drive.

I never log on to the VPN.

Actually, all of my files still exist in a folder called "desktop" but the fact that they wiped out my local Outlook calendar really, really blows. Not to mention my firefox add-ons......

Pure L wrote:

bassness wrote:Your old profile was probably corrupted and a new one was created when you logged in this morning.

I think this is exactly what happened. What constitutes a "corrupted" profile though?

We see this all the time at work. I'm a desktop support tech. Most likely what happens is that the ntuser.dat file gets corrupted. That file provides the contents of the hkey_current_user hive of the registry. That contains all the configuration and customization changes each user creates and is saved in a unique file per user.

Can't speak for the VPN/access to the C drive, but it could have just been Windows Updates, or even just an unexpected shutdown with an open file... Your Outlook file is likely not lost and will either be named Outlook.pst or Outlook.ost it may have a 0 or 1 after it. Typically this is in C:\documents and settings\USERNAME\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook The local settings folder is usually hidden, so you'll have to enable the "View Hidden Files and Folders", you can probably find directions for this on google....

You can also find all your old desktop stuff in C:\documents and settings\username\desktop

It's likely when the new profile was created, it named your new profile something like c:\documents and settings\username.domain

anything from your last profile will be in the older of the 2 (if one exists). You can even get back your IE favorites, my docs etc.... You can probably just copy everything from the old location to the new (short of your ntuser.dat file) and log back on. You have to do that from a different account with admin privileges.

Hope this help...