Freeze - Reboot - Profile damaged? Any program settings lost?

hi,
today my windows vista freezed. i was running an instance of Sql Server Management studio, Firefox, Procmon and Seamonkey i think.
Vista was not responding for about 10 minutes so i pressed the button on my pc to turn my computer off. after i switched it on again and logged into my account (my domain account i'm using all the time). we are NOT using server side profiling - i have my profile only on this computer and not on other pc in the network if i loggon to a different machine!

after the reboot i started firefox - i realized that it has resetted my toolbars and icon size.
seamonkey missed my bookmarks and saved credentials.
visual studio 2008 settings seams to be resetted.
launchy started up in the top left corner like after a fresh installation.
notepad++ says "configurator" Load config.xml failed!

when i open the config.xml in myusername\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++ it is still has 6kb in size but the editor shows only NUL instead of xml.

nearly all programs seem to have lost their settings.

what happened? how to repair my profile? how to avoid reconfiguring all my programms again?

thanks for any advise!!!!

( is procmon to blame? NotePad++ - Load config.xml failed | wehuberconsultingllc.com )

Have you tried using 'System Restore'?

system restore was disabled

how to restore all my program settings? what is wrong with my profile?

Hi! You should enable System Restore How to disable or enable System Restore | Windows Vista for Beginners If you haven't deliberately disabled system restore, then I would run anti-virus scans. Perhaps "Hijack This". If you can't get it back through system restore, I see no option other than using your Vista CD for a "repair installation" See this article: system restore disabled - Technology Questions (This is about XP- but has valid points) If your favorite software isn't on disk you'll have to re-install.

hi,

it wasn't actually a freeze:
- i could still move the mouse cursor and
- press alt+tab to change the tasks but it didn't moved to any selected programm/task afterwards
- task manager was also not starting up any more even if i could select it from the taskbar's context menu.
-control+alt+delete wasn't working too.

i enabled system restore now!

NO virus found!

the programs are all still working - however the settings of some of the programs that were running (i suppose) while the "hang" are lost it seams:

-sql server management studio's window layout, credentials and servers in the object explorer are resetted/lost
-launchy - window position is lost as well + the 1st suggestion it gave me when i typed 'sql' was sql server management studio because it remembered that i started it - but now it seams that it has lost all suggestions - when i now type 'sql' it shows "sql plus" as the first suggestions - it doesn't remember my previous selections anymore
-visual studio 2008 - window layout + options
-firefox - window layout + options
-seamonkey - window layout - options + bookmarks + saved credentials in password manager
-notepad++ - windows layout + options

when i open the config.xml in myusername\AppData\Roaming\Notepad++ it is still has 6kb in size but the editor shows only NUL instead of xml.

as of this fact above - should i suppose that the hang "shreddered" also all of my other program setting files because of open file handles or whatever?
if so how comes that the programms themselves are still working and none of the .exe or .dll files got shreddered???

anything i can do?

Same happened to me.
Lost Firefox, Thunderbird and Outlook settings, profile and data.
Thunderbird and outlook I had a BK, but not from Firefox that I had saved passwords and some bookmarks... profile files just disappeared.
How can windows just delete them?

Using Last Known Good Configuration