oohh! gang, I got a major problem

I come back from a weekend up north-I'm out of the house for 3 days. I come back and there's no sound in my computer. Won't play cd's, no sounds with solitaire etc. I try to look for the cause; no devise manager. Gone. Nada. Zip. All system info programs, it tells me have been moved or removed. I go to system history and sure enough on 8/19/04 at 10:35 pm EVERYTHING was removed. In System Information under history -Hardware Resources, everything 'changed'. Under components-on 8/18/04: C: property "Change" changed from "Update" to "Delete" then on 8/19/04 everything "removed" Under Software Environment, everything "removed".
I have a grrrr, "housemate" who fashions himself as a major techie. Our relationship is strained at best since I never wanted him here and tolerate him on the premise he will be gone on the first. Don't care if he did it. I just want to know if I can fix it. And how do I if it can be done? I have some rather big programs in there and would really like to not lose them if possible. And if it wasn't sabotage could configuring a game inadvertantly do this? Or a more complex program like poser or folio?
As an aside, I also noticed that the screen display was scrunched making all the words look like condensed letters. Related? Please help.
The computer is an emachine 533 with Windows xp Pro, a generic 8 gig hard drive, 64 mg ram, an nvidia ge-force 440se 64mg graphics card and a sporadically rotating 2nd 2 gig hard drive. It's a Seagate in there now, before it was a Japanese brand. Yes, I know there's no room for the 2nd hard drive. I switched the ribbon cable with a 2 plug one and set the 2nd drive as slave. Works fine. That was a while ago and not part of this problem.

 

You could try to do a system restore and pick a restore point that is before 8/19/04

 

i havent heard of a system fubar'ed that badly from a simple 'glitch'.

that sounds either like a trojan/virus bent on destroying your system, or sabotage.

if you back up all your information (if it still exists) files/pictures etc.., then you can reformat and get back to normal.

all those programs and games can be reinstalled without problem

 

Well, for a start that machine is under the minimum spec to run XP. You would gain a lot of speed and possibly prevent problems with running applications if you downgraded to win2000 or win98. I also suggest you backup and reformat.

Sounds like a virus or somthing, normally I'd try and help remove it but its going to be more effort than its worth trying to un-do all this crud thats happened

 

thanks you guys, i see you all showed up sort of all at once. Love it. Ok here's where it really gets good. All the restore points are gone too. It ran XP fine, still does except for this. System restore is there but empty of restore points. Add/remove hardware is there but doesn't function. It can't install a printer because the software for identifying and installing the hardware is gone or moved. So all this is only worth doing if the programs are moved-more on that here--(I wanted to print the system info but , eh! no printer) also this machine hasn't been online for 2 months and has already gotten a clean bill of health since then. Now I could switch the modem to that computer. If you know how to get in you could try that, but my computer hasn't got enough left in it to help you get in. (Had a LAN and even though it wasn't being used when this happened it got trashed too). The thing that gets me on all this is all the addresses of the components are changed sometimes by only a couple of digits. Again, it can't retrieve system info but it can retrieve system history. And here are where any clues may be.

 

I really think it would be more worth your while backing up your documents and re-formatting. Time spent re-installing all of the programs will be much less than the time trying to edit all of these registry entries and checking files.

One last ditch attempt at getting you back on the road again.

get your XP cd handy.

go Start -> run -> cmd. type

sfc /scannow

That should check your system files. However I'm not sure this will help, as the problems seem to be with the registry.

 

don't have a boot disk either. Although that would restore the OS there's still 6 gig of files I don't want Oh!! Most important. - Found Novell will get back to you

 

Igot it! I got it! My dear neighbor stopped in I showed him the problem. He went straight to admin tools-services. There it all was, "disabled" right down the line. So all I had to do was go back through, enable and start each item in hte list. I still had to reconfigure stuff that had lost its settings and then go back to start programs that were dependent on the ones not started, but eventually I got it pretty much back up and running again. I got rid of NSE Pro, Novell, Folio. Whatever, it's one program and I believe the culprit. I think it tried to coopt all the settings to it own configuration and in the process changed the file path of just about every program and component in my computer. So when I go in, nothing is where is should be. And hence can't be reached. The telling thing was in the system information history window. I couln't get sys info but I could get history. Absolutely everything was changed or disabled at 10:35:36pm Thursday the 19th. No variation in seconds let alone minutes in the "change" order. Goldfish I am going to check out the DCing thing you mentioned and what's th 1k barrier? I know you mean 1000, but of what? Oh and I never did have a boot disk so I couldn't have gone that route if I wanted to. And remember? All the restore points up to now have been lost. I lost them for good. All I can do now is start new ones from this pint on. This is one I think people could stick in their bag of tricks. See if a program like Folio got installed at the time the problem started and check services in admin tools. It all gets real obvious right there.
Thanks again, I was in the middle of trying your suggestions when my neighbor walked in. So your efforts weren't wasted and now I'm going to Goldfish's thing.

 

I've seen this on a few customers machines that have come in. I don't know if it's an update that does this or if it's some form of malware. But the people I've talked to say that they've never touched the services. But they did exactly what your machine did.