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Over the weekend my son was working on a dell 800 laptop using ms word and an onscreen keyboard called discover by madentec and all of a sudden the computer shut down. When we rebooted...all of the files and shortcuts on his desktop were gone. The only thing left was the recyle bin...and that was empty. We've run a virus scan and nothing comes up. Any idea what could have happened?

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With regards to your problem, that sounds pretty weird try doing a system restore to a day or two before it happened and see if it works properly again

Is everything else the same ? What could've happened is that the Windows user got corrupted & so Windows created a new one. If you're running Windows XP go to the system drive & then "Documents and settings", see if there aren't two user folders with the same name (the second might have a name like name.old or something).

If you're running Vista I believe you have to look in C:\Users if I'm not mistaken.

Or the start menu could have switched modes, One mode 'My Computer' and all that appear on the start menu, the other they all appear on the desktop.

The two modes are called.

Start Menu
Classic Start Menu

And can be accessed by right clicking the start bar.

A simple idea, probably wrong.