Power outages corrupted windows?!

So last night I had two power outages. It didn't seem like a big deal and it was at like 4 in the morning. One of my laptops doesn't have a battery in it (no good anymore) and was on during the outages. Given the hour, I simply decided to go to bed. Well, when I returned to the computer, some severe changes have occurred. My desktop is no longer what it used to be (icons and background different) and my personal files are all moved. If I click on "my documents", my personal files are not there, however if I go through "documents and settings" and click on my user profile, everything is where it should be ("desktop" folder has everything as well as "my document" folder). Honestly, it doesn't SEEM like a big deal at first glance, but ALL OF MY PROGRAM SETTINGS HAVE GONE BACK TO DEFAULT!!! I tried system restore and it failed each date I chose. This doesn't make sense to me at all. This computer has suffered power outages before and this has never occurred. Really need some help on this one guys. I've tried everything I know.

 

It sounds like you're logged into a new Windows User Account. I've never heard of a power outage causing such a thing to happen, but let's run with it for a second.

Try:

Start Menu>> Log Off User>> Log Off. At that point you will be brought to the user login screen. Verify the User Account's in the list are correct, and log back into the appropriate one. Try this even if you only have one user account on your computer.

Also, check the system event logs to see if Windows recovered from a system failure.

 

A power outage shouldn't have such a drastic effect. Moving the contents of documents and settings can have a drastic effect. I would suggest that you create a new user with Admin powers, log on as that user and then move your own documents and settings back to where they should be.

John

 

Just to update a little bit, not all of my programs function properly. It's as if Windows has done a clean install on my system and put all of my old stuff in different locations.

 

His user profile was corrupted, which can happen from an improper shutdown.
You're currently logged in under a profile called username.computername, while you're usually logged in under a profile just called username.

You can confirm this by going start > run and typing %APPDATA% and hitting enter. If you look at your current path to this folder, it will show C:\Documents and Settings\ username.computername\Application Data

The simplest fix is to follow these steps:
1) Go to C:\Documents and Settings
2) Rename your old profile (username) to username.old
3) Go into user accounts, and delete that user account. Create another account with the same name.
4) Open the username.old folder, and copy everything from it (exclude hidden folders) to the new C:\Documents and Settings\username folder.

And that should be it.

 

Only thing unusual in the event log is a file paging error.

 

Ok Hep, will try it out. If this should work, I'll let you know. Further, is anything I can do to prevent this from happening again? (besides making sure my laptop doesn't lose power?)

 

Not really, it's a fluke thing. You didn't cause it, nor could you have prevented it.
Always make sure you have two accounts on a computer (Administrator + your primary account). Never use the built in Administrator account as your primary account.

 

It's possible that the power outages caused the system to crash and corrupted the user account that was logged in at the time. As a result, when the computer rebooted after the outage that caused the corruption, the computer would have replaced the corrupted user profile with a copy of the default profile, which would not contain any of the customizations you had put into your original user account (the one that got corrupted) and, as a result, your desktop and whatnot would all look different but your documents and whatnot will all (generally) be there to be found if you go looking for them.

 

Ok, I did what you said Hep, and it helped out but things still aren't right. All the files are moved back over but the settings for things are still missing. Perhaps, I should copy the hidden folders?! I just tried to run windows media player and it's asking me to go through the entire setup again. Also, my original background picture is still gone. Should I try copying over the hidden folders?

 

Just went through the hidden files and it seems to be that all of my program settings are there. I'm going to try moving them over.

 

As long as you do not move over the ntuser.dat file you should be okay. That's the corrupted file.

 

Thanks for the quick heads up, I'll keep that in mind when moving them over...