drivers disappeared!

[tracymort]

i turned on my pc one day and it was strange, it had been reset to all original settings including the desktop appearance, internet settings etc all my hardware drivers 'disappeared' yet my virus software detected nothing unusual! any ideas?

[lisaj]

Windows stores all of this information (except the hardwar part) in a profile for you. Recently I also had Windows 'forget' the existence of my profile and create a new one called TEMP. The old profile and all it's data and settings is still there, but my active profile as far as Windows is concerned is empty. My solution was to edit the registry to point back to where my profile really was. Unless you're very comfortable with computers however I wouldn't recommend that. Also, if this is the same problem as you're having, you'll need to find your original profile - something that will vary depending on which version of Windows you're using : 95/98/ME/NT/2K/XP