Something Very Strange Has Happened To XP On My Laptop, Any Ideas?

Keltik THC · 1 Oct 2009 at 19:49

Hi guys,

i came home today and as i always do, i switch on my desktop and my laptop... all is well... until i realise that the background of my laptop which runs XP is the generic 'evergreen fields' that displays when you first install the OS (it wasnt that image this morning).

Then i notice my theme is the generic blue XP, my custom theme is gone.

Then i notice some of my programs aren't automatically running, but some are... some programs work fine and other require to be installed again..

My documents have all gone, its as if ive clean installed it.

Luckily i have found all my data, everything is still within my 'Administrators Documents' and i have lost no Data, but outside of the 'admin documents', 'My documents' is totally empty.

It is almost as if Windows has installed itself over my existing version whilst keeping a few odd programs (like Kaspersky, thank god), and my custom IP settings and such stuff is still in effect... but it shutdown quickly this morning and started quickly and it said nothing about installing or changing anything.

My account still uses the same password and has the same name and i am still logging on as the administrator, yet i have a separate administrator file with my old files in my 'documents & settings' folder

I had to set up a few programs back up again, and its generally a bit of a pain but i have lost no data.

anyone have any ideas as to WTF has happened? worked fine this morning, and i shut it down correctly... after using Windows all my life since Win95 this is a first for me.

Meatball · 1 Oct 2009 at 19:52

Something similar happened to me a while ago and I found all my documents the same way. I backed up everything and reformatted just in case it was something more serious causing the corruption. I was using XP at the time as well so a lonnggg time ago.

Keltik THC · 1 Oct 2009 at 19:56

Meatball said:
Sounds like your user account became corrupt. Check in the users folder and look for a folder named <yourusername>-backup or something similar. You will find all your old documents and settings there, if I'm right. Something similar happened to me a while ago.

Good point, although i thought i would have received some sort of error message rather than Windows just carrying on like nothing has happened.

oh well, no data lost so I guess it gives me a good excuse to do a clean install this weekend.

Meatball · 1 Oct 2009 at 20:01

Keltik THC said:
Good point, although i thought i would have received some sort of error message rather than Windows just carrying on like nothing has happened.

oh well, no data lost so I guess it gives me a good excuse to do a clean install this weekend.

I edited my post after reading through all your thread. I done the same, backed up my documents and reformatted

. When it happened to me I didn't get any kind of error message which I thought was bizarre as well.

alex24 · 1 Oct 2009 at 20:06

I don't miss XP and it doing things like this, you should really try 7 if you can, much more robust and reliable, with many new features and the speed of XP.

As you said, a clean install is the way to go, you'd waste too much time trying to sort stupid issues otherwise, it's not worth the time trying to fix it.

Keltik THC · 1 Oct 2009 at 21:30

alexhull24 said:
I don't miss XP and it doing things like this, you should really try 7 if you can, much more robust and reliable, with many new features and the speed of XP.

As you said, a clean install is the way to go, you'd waste too much time trying to sort stupid issues otherwise, it's not worth the time trying to fix it.

i already have windows 7 on my desktop, i use XP on my Laptop, its nice and fast and im not going to buy another license for now.

i haven't logged off yet, i guess i should see if it does the same again.

Dutchman · 1 Oct 2009 at 21:43

Sounds like something in your profile became corrupt. When you look at Documents and settings folder, is there now a administrator.1 or administrator.temp or similar and all your new files/favorites/desktop items in there where your old stuff is just the plain administrator folder ?

kolala · 2 Oct 2009 at 03:15

I think the latest ver of the UPH cleanup service fixes this sort of prob
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=1b286e6d-8912-4e18-b570-42470e2f3582

bledd · 2 Oct 2009 at 08:55

alexhull24 said:
I don't miss XP and it doing things like this, you should really try 7 if you can, much more robust and reliable, with many new features and the speed of XP.

As you said, a clean install is the way to go, you'd waste too much time trying to sort stupid issues otherwise, it's not worth the time trying to fix it.

it's not a very common issue, it's something to do with the ntuser.dat becoming corrupt, I've only seen it twice myself, and about 20 occurrences on here of it

just create a new user account and copy your documents into that account, then delete all the old accounts

install this.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloadS/...6d-8912-4e18-b570-42470e2f3582&displaylang=en

it can prevent the problem re-occurring

edit -oh, link in the post above

sturmtruppe · 2 Oct 2009 at 10:12

you're not alone, XP was always doing stupid things like this to me at least 4-5 times a year which i couldnt be bothered with so i used vista instead, far less problems.