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IE9 Favorites Vanished Overnight but Folder Still There. Other Symptoms Also

Respondido IE9 Favorites Vanished Overnight but Folder Still There. Other Symptoms Also

  • Tuesday, October 09, 2012 3:31 PM
     
     
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    I lost all of my Favorites.  All of my stored links, both under the Favorites Tab and on my Favorites Bar vanished overnight.  I checked my "Favorites Folder" (C:\users\username\Favorites) and it is still there, and so are all of my websites.  Now, before coming here, I tried the "Restore Default Location" thing, I also tried the "Restore Previous Version" thing, and I even tried the "Reset IE" thing.  Obviously nothing worked or I wouldn't be here.

    As I said, this happened overnight.  One day everything was just fine and, when I booted up the next day, not only were my Favorites missing, but my Desktop Icons were all translucent, and all of my Desktop Gadgets were gone and the Gadget Window will not open so that I can even try to restore them.

    Right away I performed an online search and found that the "Translucent Icon" thing and found that a virus could be the culprit (at least for that part).  So, I ran a full Virus Scan (which I also perform regularly every week, in addition to running Real-Time Scanning all of the time).    It found 0 Viruses, 4 Trojans, 0 Rootkits, 0 Tracking Cookies, and 0 Potentially Unwanted Programs.

    The desktop Icons had all been switched to “Hidden” so I was able to fix them by selecting all and unclicking “Hidden”, so that much was easy.  However, I have not found any way to fix my Favorites or Gadgets problem.  Someone Please help!

     

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  • Wednesday, October 10, 2012 3:38 PM
    Answerer
     
     
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    I lost all of my Favorites. 

    Sounds more like you lost the UI for showing them.  Unfortunately none of the things you tried would fix that.   A generalized repair of IE's registry settings probably would but we still don't have one that really does that.   You could try  IE8-rereg  but after that I think you would need to do some diagnosis, e.g. run ProcMon on two systems, one working and one not, to compare the traces for their essential differences.

     
    Good luck

    Robert Aldwinckle
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  • Wednesday, October 10, 2012 7:39 PM
     
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    No, actually I figured it out. 

    As I stated, my desktop icons went translucent, and I corrected that problem by unclicking the hidden setting on each of them.  Well, while searching for answers, I happened to notice that I had other files listed as Hidden.  So, I went through my entire file system (Although it appeared that only "User" files were affected) and deselected the "Hidden" box, which then trickled down to all subfolders.  It still took some time though because it wouldn't let me just select the "User" branch.  I have to go down through my documents,  public documents, my pictures, public pictures, etc, etc.  Once that was done, appartently IE was able to "see" the file again.  My Gadgets were a different story.  I tracked down a Windows Support article that had a "Fix It" to uninstall the Sidebar and another one to reinstall it.   The article said there was a security issue with some Gadgets.  But I have had the same ones ever since Win 7 first came out, so I feel fairly safe since they aren't new ones.

    Anyway, thank you for checking.  You might want to let others know about this.  I doubt that I'm the only one this has happened to, I just wish I knew the cause.  I'm guessing it was that virus they mentioned.  Except they never said anything about any affected files other than the Desktop icons.

    Stew Hagerty

    • Marked As Answer by kiltedcook Wednesday, October 10, 2012 7:39 PM
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