Emptying temp internet and cookies deleted several programs

Win 7 home x64

Yea. My mothers farmville quit working and the suggested fix was clean the temp files.

So.. she went into ie8 and deleted cookies and temp files. Somehow.. this managed to delete all her popcap games (installed from disks.. not downloaded) deleted Open Office, Flash, Java, and all kinds of dlls.

I was able to repair OO.. it broke adobe's downloader where I can't uninstall it.. ccleaner won't delete it from the installed programs list.. and it gives an error every time you try to reinstall flash. I found an offline installer and got flash running again, but I can see problems next time it needs and update.


My question.. How did IE manage to do this? If it was anyone else I'd swear they just deleted their program files folder. However I've tought her better than that. (lol)

 

maybe ask and show you what was done?

are there any restore points?

 

Yes, get her to explain what she actually did. I hate to say nothing is impossible with computers, but just deleting cookies and temp files could not possibly cause all those problems.

 

That was one of the first things I did. She went in and did it the correct way.


I also tried a restore.. it didn't restore anything usefull.

 

Microsoft Support:
How to manually delete cookie files in Internet Explorer 8

Microsoft.Windows.com : applies to Windows Vista
(could not find similar page that applies to Win 7)

Delete Temporary Internet Files

Although you can do these things from within IE8,
neither of these help sources gives those instructions.