It's snowing again. No, wait sleet. No, now it's rain. Oh no, now it's snow. Sheez. Ol' Ma Nature must be concerned these days because all the snow from the recent storms melted or something. Luckily, this won't be enough weather to cause a problem, or likely even enough to stick around.
Even IT pro's have home computer problems sometimes, only ours are usually more complicated because we tend to really challenge our computers. So anyhow, I got home yesterday, found my user profile (among a number of other things) in Windows was completely shot. I had to do some fancy maneuvering to even get into the system, and once things were close to being back to normal, so much data was lost I had to almost start like it was a new computer as far as set up goes. Not literally start new - none of this reinstall Windows crap. It needed to be fixed.
In the process of a lot of repair steps one of the things I had to do was to fight an unhappy hard drive and it's file table. I was certain I had lost some critical data, but suspected it was still in a recoverable mode on the drive. So, I decided to register a copy of Active @ Undelete Pro, which helped me in terms of getting a large number of otherwise lost, deleted and unassociated files on the drive back. While the files and directories in question were no longer associated with their original locations (that file table was pretty screwed up), this program still allowed me to browse them and recover every file I needed (like email dbx files, application profiles, some docs, etc.). That software is worth it's weight in gold. The version I bought (Pro) is $49.95, and allows removable disks to be worked with, but if the only locations you want to be able to recover from are your local hard drives (most home users), the standard version is only $29.95 - and well worth it. BTW, for $99.95 they also have an enterprise version that I will be purchasing for work when I get back to the office next week. It allows you to recover from other computers over the network - very cool.
There's one lesson here worth learning for the paranoid among us (yes, that's you, Steve 
). Anything you store on/in your Desktop, My Documents, My Pictures, My.* (etc.) folders is stored under your user profile. So, if you want to make sure a Windows glitch is less likely to cause you heartburn, consider relocating the folder(s) or simply store your files elsewhere, not in the Documents and Settings tree.