Vista destroyed everything - All e-mails, e-mail accounts, IE and fire

[XPerties]

I went to bed last night and as always left my pc on. When i woke up this morning my pc was at the login page. When I typed my password in it said "setting up desktop". Once vista loaded all my icons were gone, all mail accounts and e-mails in my outlook were gone, all quick launch apps were gone, all my favorites in IE and firefox were gone. It's like a new system.

Does anyone know WTF happen? I looked at the logs and only saw the following for the 14 of March.

[Mr Snrub]

Sounds like you have a blank user profile.

Check in event logs for anything relevant:

- Click Start, right-click Computer, click Manage

- Expand Event Viewer / Windows Logs

- Highlight System

In particular look for any EventLog entries that might indicate the machine shutting down or restarting...

[DigeratiPrime]

whoa I am sure XPerties knows what he is doing, I would image the drive for backup purposes before proceeding further. I am sure you can recover whatever has gone missing or been deleted.

You say you had to type in your password so it sounds like you logged into your existing profile, but that it self destructed somehow.

Was this RTM, did you upgrade from XP, and/or did you install any updates? very interesting...

[Mr Snrub]

Actually, having to enter the correct password indicates he is logging onto the correct user account, but the fact that the "setting up your desktop" message appears indicates that it has taken the default user template and is creating a new profile for that user.

Might be worth a browse in %systemdrive%\Users, and in particular the datestamps on any folders in there too...

[wfunction]

Did you just resize (or somehow repartition) your Vista drive?

Check to see if Vista still has the same drive letter. Does it help?

Also, you might want to check out recovery software.