XP settings gone?

Earlier today I was away from my computer, and my 4 year old son was sitting at it, playing his online Thomas the Tank Engine game in Firefox, and a little bit later I came back to the computer to sit down and view some sites.

Not 2 minutes later, a small window popped up in the top left hand corner then disappeared, my desktop background went blank, every icon I had on the desktop disappeared except My Computer and Recycle Bin, my start menu went blank except for Games, Startup and Accessories, and all of them are empty. Not to mention my QuickLaunch buttons are missing. Firefox also lost all of it's personal settings, bookmarks, extentions, everything.

Everything in my C: drive is right where it's supposed to be, but somewhere I'm assuming there's a 'personal settings' file that sets all that stuff up went bye-bye. I haven't done anything out of the ordinary and my son knows to stay within Firefox.

Any ideas?

EDIT: And I just found out that ALL of the hundreds of pictures that my wife had stored in the 'My Picutres' folder are GONE!!! What can cause all of this?

 

Try booting in safe mode and see if everything is more or less normal. Maybe the hard drive dumped on you. Find out who made your hard drive, visit their web site, download and run their diagnostic to test you hard drive's integrity. There are data recovery programs here at Major Geeks so (hopefully) you'll be able to get any lost stuff recovered. You might want to try a system restore to a time/date right before the weirdness happened... system restore can be a life saver! I think you might be on the right track when you mentioned personal settings... it could be that the user account info got scrambled (or hit w/ a virus?)... A visit to the malware removal forum and a read thru the stickies may not be a bad idea...

hd2k

 

Well I rebooted in Safe Mode, checked everything out, everything looks normal. All of my pictures/settings were still gone, so I thought I would investigate a little more.

-My UTorrent settings are gone, reset to like I just installed the program.

-I had 3 user accounts, my regular, one called Administrator, and the ASP.Net one, which is password protected.

-All of my saved passwords/internet history reset.

-I ran PC File Inspector Recovery to hope to recover my pictures, but it didn't find anything.

-I have no restore points. Awhile ago I had a virus that migrated into the restore, and after a long scan I found over 3,000 copies of the virus inside the restore. Since then I haven't used it.

-I used Spybot, and it found a few tracking cookies, but nothing special.

I'm pretty much shot as to how this worked. Again, I'm still on the same thoughts that EVERYTHING that is 'setting' or 'personalized' related is gone, but I'm unsure a)how it happaned, and b)where to go to from here.

Help?

 

Bump?

Any ideas, or am I screwed?