[rokus]

.. This is just a question. I believe no resolution is possible. I was checking out some advertised smileys inside MSN Messenger. I clicked on one, which popped a small notice "Install the viewer first!". I closed the popup, and then the small browser window (IE). My screen flickered a bit at that point. I said my good-byes to the person I was IMing, signed out, and exited my Messenger.

.. My desktop was decimated. Easily 70% of the icons (files, folders, programs) were gone. The programs were still located in the C:\Programs Files folder, just the icons were gone. The big headache was that all the files had completely vanished! Gone.

.. All these files and folders (and the pgm icons) were saved to my desktop, as opposed to folders under the C:\ drive. I know that sounds dumb as the "desktop" is located under Documents and Settings/user/ etc. under the C:\ drive. Still, everything that was saved to the desktop was gone. This includes several files originally saved to the desktop, but later moved to different folders on the C:\. Files that I moved to a 2nd internal HD did not get nicked (??).

.. I ran at least 4 free file retrieval programs which brought back about 4 word docs and 3 mp3's. Each of those files were corrupted and unusable. I tried a demo retrieval pgm (a "look but can't touch" thing) that seemed to produce a couple of hundred mp3 files, but they were all 1024KB in size, saying to me that my mp3's were chopped into packets. I also did 2 System Restores which brought back about half of the folder icons, but they were empty. The Restore did, however, bring back all of the pgm icons, fully functional.

.. Yadda yadda. To keep from being long-winded (and losing your attention ), my question is whether or not this sort of action has been seen before. I believe that I have lost about 3GB of music (they're all on LPs & CDs, thus retrievable) and about 1GB of word docs and pics. I usually do a full DVD backup of my personal stuff every month, but methinks that I should be doing more frequent, now.

.. Uncertain if I should be posting this here, but I believe that it was a nasty sort of malware that slammed me. Thanks in advance for your thoughts and observations!


Keep The Faith*
Robb

[rokus]

Yup. Just said to myself, "Fuhgeddaboudit. The files are gone forever."
Thus, I solved it all by my lonesome! Neat, huh??