Hi everyone, I'm having a very strange problem with my system - any insight or advice would be very much appreciated. Basically, I just went to use the computer and found it had automatically restarted itself. When I logged back on, almost everything had changed. My desktop background had disappeared, icons were missing, and all personal files (pictures, documents, pdf's) had also disappeared. The configuration of the system seemed different as well -- it asked me for a user name now, whereas before I did not log on with a user name. It was as if the system was entirely wiped out and started again, except that some programs were still present that were not originally on the machine (such as windows media player, which I had just installed the night before). This gives me hope that the rest of the data is still recoverable, but I am at a loss as to where to begin. If anyone has encountered anything similiar, I'd love to know. Thanks a lot, Justin

You may have a corrupt profile. In Documents and Settings do you have one profile listed for you or two? If there is only one, then your profile was partially corrupt. If two, then you can login as Administrator and copy the old profile to the newly created one. Life is more painless for those who are brainless.

Thanks a lot Jennifer. Strangely, it seems as if the original profile has disappeared altogether. All that is visible are the windows default profiles, "Administrator", "User", and "Guest". The original profile and it's contents are nowhere to be found... Any insight is very much appreciated. Justin

I am assuming that you work with Windows 2000 or > and terminal service. You can do 2 things. 1.- Trace down the path that comes up on your screen when logging on or off. This window stays up for about 20 secs, so have to be fast. This path, usually points to the username profile folder (e.g. \\server\username\profile\subfolder), where server is the server name where the user's U drive is located at, and "profile" is the folder name which is the extension given when the users account was created on terminal serivce profile. Once you get that path, follow it and look for and delete any *prf*.* file, where "*" could be any alphanumeric character. If the 20 sec error message does not show up at all go to procedure #2. 2.- You have to find any *prf* files on your U drive and delete them. On your next logon, go to start/search/for files or folders. Select Tools/folder options and click on the View tab and check Show hidden files and folders. Launch a search for any *prf*.* file, where "*" could be any alphanumeric character. Delete all of them and log off and log back on a few time to make sure that your profile is rebuilt. It might be that you will need to recreate shortcuts and accesses.