Hi, I was working on my laptop the other day and I glanced at the Desktop and noticed that all the files and links on the Desktop had vanished. They had all been deleted. They weren't even in the recycle bin. I later used file recovery programs and recovered most of the files. One of these recovery programs showed a deleted folder called 'Desktop' so it seems that I somehow deleted the entire Desktop folder.

I have no idea how I did this, and I am unsure what information to supply that might help others to explain the situation. At the time that the Desktop was deleted , Mozilla was crashing. Earlier on, I had been trying to delete that folder called 'Favorites' which is represented by a yellow star icon. I wasn't on-line. I have good virus protection. I think that this happened once before when I first got the pc and I changed the account name.

Sorry for the lack of information. Does anyone have any ideas how this sort of thing might happen?

Thanks,

Ashka

Hi Ashka and welcome to the forums.

What I want you to do is to click on desktop with the right mouse button and at the top of the menu you should see "Arrange Icons" with a little arrow, click on that and chec near the bottom of the resulting menu and see if there is a checkmark next to "show desktop items". If not then click on that.

Hi, thanks for the prompt response. One point I omitted to mention: when I first noticed that the Desktop had been deleted, not all the icons had vanished. There remained those icons that 'All Users' can see. The folder

C:\Documents and Settings\Me\Desktop

was empty though.

So I tried adjusting the 'Show Desktop Icons' setting, as you suggest, and that made the few icons that remain for 'All Users' to vanish or reappear. Thanks for the idea; I didn't know about that feature of Windows.

Ashka

Welcome to the PCHF Ashka,

That's an interesting problem.

You've obviously checked the recycle bin?

Hi GaRHaR, yes, I checked the recycle bin. It remained unchanged during the whole process (it was not emptied, nor was anything added to it).

Although I have little knowledge of these matters, my inclination is that the problem lies with Windows, because when I was first given the laptop by the computer officer in my department, I changed the account name to match my own and the same thing happened. I wasn't bothered then because I had nothing much on the Desktop. Now I'm scared of using the thing in case it happens again!

Thanks, Ashka

try clicking on Start...Run....and type in explorer.exe
if that does not work do you have the XP cd still?

I follow the procedure Start-->Run-->explorer.exe and the folder

C:\Document and Settings\Me\My Documents

opens. It contains a couple of files that were not deleted during the crash. After the crash I used Windows search facility to search the hard drive for my missing files, but to no avail.

I do have the Windows XP cd still. The laptop came with Windows XP installed, as usual, so the cd is in its pack and has not been opened.

Thanks, Ashka