Computer Not Itself

[TennBikeBerk]

I booted up my computer and logged in as I have always done. I have a Centrino laptop running XP Pro, SP2, and I have one user account in addition to the default administrator account. I typed in my password, and waited for my desktop to load.

First I notice that my background is totally different. Then I notice the theme is blue, but I have mine set for gray. There are only a few icons on my desktop, but a lot are missing. The program list in my start menu is much shorter than it should be, and it was alphabetized, but last I saw it, it was quite out of order. I see some familiar processes running in the taskbar, but I'm not sure everything is there. I decide to load up Firefox. I am honestly thinking at this point that my system had comopromised, and thought maybe I'd get a message when I loaded Firefox that would confirm that. However, I got the "Welcome to Firefox" screen that you get when you first install or upgrade to a new version, and I was prompted if I wanted to import any bookmarks. All of my bookmarks were gone.

At this point, yea, I'm flipping out! What the bleep happened to my computer? I thought about where my laptop had been since I last booted it up: it has been on my desk the whole time, and nobody should have touched it. I remember turning it off last night, and I have a very long password on my computer so it would take some skill to be able to do anything with it.

At this point I decide to run a system restore. When I did so, I noticed that a checkpoint had been made quite recently, titled: "Software Distribution Service 2.0" I have absolutely no idea what that is, but I proceeded to choose an earlier restore point....luckily it was yesterday.

After my computer rebooted, everything was back to normal: my grey theme, all my desktop icons, Firefox bookmarks, and my unorganized start menu.

My question is this: what the heck happened!?!?!?!

[flanzig1]

Sounds like you got infected with some nasties. Would be a good time to do virus/spyware/malware scans. Make sure you have a firewall on.

[TennBikeBerk]

I'm not so sure about that. Just a few days ago I ran AVG, Spybot, and Ad-Aware scans, all of which I keep updated. I also use SpywareBlaster, as well as the Windows Firewall and I am behind a NAT router.

I'm running some scans anyhow.

One thing I forgot to mention....when I logged in, a got a window about my sercurity center settings. It said my anti-virus was up to date, I am firewalled, and it also showed the status of my automatic update settings.

EDIT: It almost seems as thought it was a different user account...with the icons on my desktop being the ones that I have set for all of the user accounts, and the ones that weren't there were specific to my account. That would also might explain the Firefox welcome screen and the brevity of the start menu. However, I am 99.99% sure that I was logged in on the account that I always am....It had my usual name and icon on the top of the start menu, and I remember entering my password before logging it.