[debodun]

I thought doing a system restore only affected Windows files and not personal files, but when I did a restore back to Oct24th, I lost all the files I had downloaded after that as well as having some files moved to different folders. Am I mistaken about how the system restore works and is there a way to retrieve the missing files?

P.S. I did a restore because for some reason, many exe files that I frequently use (such a calc and charmap) disappeared from my system32 folder. Also the IE and Outlook Express icons disappeared from the desktop screen.

[elister]

OK, If I understand it correctly System Restore Monitors ALL files which are "NON DATA FILES". It'll not touch anything with file extension .doc, .docx,.xml, MS calls it "COMMON DOCUMENT TYPES" (a rather fancy name ) Also it'll not touch anything in My Documents folder even if it is a monitored file type (.exe, .dll ).

You can go to %windir%\system32\restore\Filelist.xml and see a complete list of monitored and excluded file types.

So if your downloaded content was under the executable criteria it may have been monitored.

To undo the restoration I think there is a link on the system restore dialog like "Undo previous restoration". You can try that.

Cheers

[elister]

you can also see here for list of files monitored: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...8VS.85%29.aspx