Yesterday all was well. So as a treat I thought I would Disc Cleanup and Disc Degrag to keep my little lap top happy. Did that and put the lap top in a drawer - of course the battery went flat during the night so Windows may not have shut down properly.

Today - well its another story - I plug in, switch on and choose my User Name - a dialigue appears saying Cannot find your personal settings. And it can't - short cuts missing on Desk Top, email connection and address book info missing, web site favourites etc not there. For a while I thought I'd lost all my files - including photos - oh No!

But Picassa went off and found them - good little program....

IN my My Computer, My Documents I now have only My Music and My Pictures - both empty of course.

However, I found all my files and pictures - via My Computer, Local Disc, Documents and Settings, My User Name, My Documents - they were all there. Phew.

I notice however, at My User Name above there is a file (178M) that has no name other than a ~ symbol. When I try and open it it wants me to choose the program to use - I chose Notepad and when opened I could detect some stuff that looked like parts fo my email address book.

So maybe file ~ is my Personal Settings?? What would it be labelled with normally - perhaps if I could rename it it might just work??

I've gone as far as I can go with this problem _ any help out there!!!??

Craigh

I have the same problem. And could use some serious help, because all of my work is lost when i shut down the computer and turn it back on.
My last desktop shortcuts and documents are lost: they're not in my documents folder neither.

Where can we find the problem. I cant shut down my computer anymore because of the work that will get lost that way.

So maybe file ~ is my Personal Settings?? What would it be labelled with normally - perhaps if I could rename it it might just work??

it not the name you need to change but the files extension you need to know ,that comes after the ~ ,like ~.exe or .txt ,that maybe hidden ,i think this file is a backup of sorts.open mycomputer go to/tools /folder options/view ,and uncheck ,hide extension for known file types,this should give you a extension on the file now ,google search the extension ,like .bak or what ever it is

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