I just had something very strange and unnerving happen with IE 8.

This morning I downloaded and installed beta 2 for IE 8. It went through the install process pretty typically. Upon restart, I opened IE 8 and went through the setup options. I closed the browser and went to look for a file on my desktop. It was then that I suddenly realized (being both horrified and perplexed) that somehow the install or setup seems to have deleted all the files on my desktop. The even weirder thing is that I had some files in folders and those files and their folders appear to be untouched. However everything else is gone.

I had some pretty important files on my desktop and so if anyone can help me to figure out why or how they got deleted, I would really appreciate it. I am running Win XP Pro SP3

One thing that I will note is that I have my desktop folder remapped to a different location. This has never caused a problem before and I have my documents folder remapped as well and nothing happened to it. I made sure to check the default location to see if the files had been moved back, but they hadn't. From everything I can tell, the mapping is still in place and working fine, but the files are just gone!

Boot several times did't work...

Thank you for the replies everybody. I will try a recovery program. I hope this will work because I only rebooted and did't place new big file yet...

Do you have system restore enabled? If so a restore point should have been created as most MS software does.

This doesnt sound like an IE8 problem, instead it sounds more like your account itself has had problems. I have had this happen to myself a few times on XP and once on Vista, normally I can solve it by rebooting.

Then you could try Little_Pobs soloution - but if this is an issue with your account it may not fix it.