I'm helping a friend with their Lenovo laptop running WinXP, SP3. We had done some updates, ran Microsoft Security Essentials, and cleaned off something called arcaadewebfirefox.dll that I thought wasn't too terrible. later that evening they rebooted and all desktop icons were gone, firefox was back to default profile, etc. at the same they they received a couple calls from those scammers posing as microsoft and offering to fix the computer. I didn't think it was related but they are convinced the computer was hacked.
I've determined all the current problems are due to the fact that they are logging into a different user profile called USERNAME.COMPUTERNAME, where before everything was just under USERNAME.
For example, the desktop icons being used are at:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME.COMPUTERNAME\Desktop
instead of
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Desktop
where I see all their previous icons where they should be, but not being accessed.
Similarly, the Firefox profile being used is here:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME.COMPUTERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\qkqvn5s1.default
instead of:
C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\sjdi38dj.default
How could this have happened, and what is recommended to get things back the way they were? Thanks!
Best Answer
Classic case of a corrupted profile. Many ways it could have happened. If you don't want to delete the profile reg key, you can try changing the
ProfilePathValue of theKey back to the original folder, but be forewarned that in my experience this rarely works. Instead it's best to delete the entire SID, backup/delete the profile folders, and reboot the machine. When the user logs back on they'll get a fresh profile, and you can manually copy the data that's needed back to the 'new' profile folder.