I just started up my personal computer for the day and it gave me a heart attack. All of my settings were gone. All of my files appeared to be gone. Most of the programs were gone. It said I was logged in as my username. After a few minutes of the fish out of water routine, I looked on the drive under C:\Users\username and everything seemed to be there. so I logged out and then back into my account and its fine. What happened? if it automatically logged a guest account, why did it show I was using my account name? How does this happen. I am so confused and relieved right now.
Do you use a local account or one that is tied to an email or Microsoft account?
I had that happen a few times with different Windows versions.
For some reason the OS decided to suddenly log me in as the SYSTEM account even though nothing indicated such, except desktop gone, files gone and every setting reset ofc.
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I’ve had it happen a couple times with logging in as an account tied to my MS account since it creates a local account with the same name. Suddenly everything is apparently gone, games don’t load because it thinks they don’t exist, etc. Usually a logout/reboot fixes it.
Excuse the silly question, but do you just mean the desktop image is reset to the blank colour, and all the Shortcuts to the files that used to be on the desktop are missing?
Or files actually gone when the login derps?
I meant all shortcuts and background.
But I did have it happen that the explorer started to derp too at the time and didn’t start, so sometimes there was even no desktop/shell at all.
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That’s because the login derp’d and defaulted to the basic user on the PC, and that seems to break A TON of registry shortcuts and settings for any user that logs in when it does that.
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I have had oddness happen like that too. Stuff like everything loads fine, but the final user space loading fails so things like the settings for my mouse bnever kick in. Years ago I have had it happen in a more complete fashion, but that was before 10.
Not to be alarmist but might be worth doing a chkdsk to make sure all is well.
local account
For me, what happened when I opened explorer was there was nothing when i clicked the shortcuts for downloads, documents, etc. When I actually when to C:\Users\username the items were there.
Come to Linux.
We can provide percutaneous coronary intervention
Sort of.
Maybe it signed you in with a temp account. IDK if this happens with local accounts but with AD accounts it happens from time to time. Did you get a pop-up saying something like “You’ve been signed in with a temporary profile”?
Not that I noticed.