Resolved Folders Deleted - By Name

A curious problem on a Toshiba laptop running XP Pro with all online updates offered from Microsoft being installed.

Folders have historically been created using the accepted name conventions without problem.
Recently, folders, thought to have been copied to the laptop, have later not been found.

Looking further, we have established a very odd fault description.

Any folder already on the computer before the fault showed is OK.

Now, if you create a folder, or copy a folder from another source (USB memory for example) then everything looks fine. You can access files in the folder and do all of the usual stuff.

If you reboot, the problem shows. The folder (and it's contents) may be deleted. Files marked (including read only) are lost.

Folders names starting 0 to 9 and A to K are lost.
Folders L to Z survive.

AVG anti virus and Malaware have failed to show up anything.

Any suggestions?

 

Resolved!

'Ask' toolbar was the problem.

A further symptom found was that any files in root directory with name/date as described earlier were deleted. This included BOOT.INI, which caused a helpful error message, though windows ran normally. Found references to this on web searches for problems with the INI file being deleted by 'Ask'. No mentions though of the strange name & date condition.

After deleting Ask toolbar, everything is fine.

If I remember correctly, this toolbar was a 'difficult to avoid' download with some other software package.

Beware! If you have 'Ask' then I recommend you delete it NOW.

 

Yes, do be careful what you ASK for. We had this problem come up in another thread recently and pretty much beat it to death. At first glance it appeared to be an IE8 problem but it turned out that some users get IE8 from sources that automatically load ASK as a default search engine. Some pretty strange problems can result.

REFERENCE

Thanks for posting back your results.