I opened the My Computer folder this morning, went into the C drive, and looked for my folder named Jackstuff where I keep all my personal files. This morning when I looked, it was gone. Everything else looks normal, but this folder has seemingly disappeared. I know that nobody messed with it or deleted it--no one uses my computer but me. I checked the recycle bin; nothing's there. I looked at the size of my C drive, and it looks to be the same size, so I don't think that this stuff was deleted. I've done searches for the folder itself and for files in the folder, and they only come up with shortcuts from the Recent Documents folder under Documents and Settings. I went into my Recent Documents folder and tried opening files that were in Jackstuff from the shortcuts there. It says that the files that the shortcuts point to have been changed or moved. I have Norton Antivirus 2003, and I constantly update it. The virus definitions are no more than a week old. I did a full scan with it; no virus found. But I think I may have some virus (that for some reason Norton is not recognizing) that has renamed my Jackstuff folder and all of the files within it. Does anyone know of such a virus, or can you think of anyway that I can find my files? I had a problem with various forms of spyware installing themselves a couple of days ago. BrowserAid was one of these. Maybe this is how it got in? My antivirus program also has an Unerase Wizard, that you can search to find and restore deleted files. I did this and found a lot of stuff, but nothing from my missing folder. I am completely baffled by this. Please help.

have you tried searching for the files? windows might find them in their new location. i doubt that it is a virus if you have the latest definitions. to get rid of your spyware, try installing something like ad-aware.

How does your undelete program work? Does it note down all your deletes as they happen and save a copy of them elsewhere? If so, and it is a virus that's deleted the folder try a different undelte program like filescavanger. You have to pay if you want to undelte like more that 60 KB but at least if you know that it has been deleted then you can find a free version or something. If you think your folder and files have been renamed, try and search for the extension (e.g .zip, .doc etc.) the more unusual the better then open a few of the results. Possibly a long shot but you never know. OR if you had big files in the folder (e.g like 3 gig) you could search for files of that size or over. Another longshot though I suppose. Let me know if there's anything you don;t understand. Er... and that's all I can think of for now. Let us know how you get on. Regards, Jon

How does your undelete program work? Does it note down all your deletes as they happen and save a copy of them elsewhere? If so, and it is a virus that's deleted the folder try a different undelete program like filescavanger. You have to pay if you want to undelete like more that 60 KB but at least if you know that it has been deleted then you can find a free version or something. Or pay ;) If you think your folder and files have been renamed, try and search for the extension (e.g .zip, .doc etc.) the more unusual the better then open a few of the results. Possibly a long shot but you never know. OR if you had big files in the folder (e.g like 3 gig) you could search for files of that size or over. Another longshot though I suppose. Let me know if there's anything you don't understand. Er... and that's all I can think of for now. Let us know how you get on. Regards, Jon

Yes, I think the undelete program saves the information for a set amount of time before purging. I have it set to save 7 days worth. I'll have to try searching for extensions, that's a good idea. I have the latest copy of adaware and I run it about once a week.

One other thought...Are you on a cable broadband connection, and is that folder set up to be shared? If so, are you running a firewall? If you're on cable, are sharing the folder, and not running a firewall, it's possible someone on your line saw the folder and deleted it, thinking it was on their local machine.

Yes, I'm on a cable broadband connection. It's at my house. There is one other computer connected to this, but no folders are shared, and I enabled the built-in windows firewall. Thank you for your thought. Thank you all for your replies. If anyone has any more suggestions, please let me know.