Mark, thanks for the reply. Its cool to drag groups of icons, it had not occurred to me.
But my problem is this: I use scanned images from the family photo album for my wallpaper, and so I drag individual icons away from the main features of the photo, and leave them around the edge of the screen. Then I can see my daughter's face, the ship in the harbor, whatever. Fine.
The next day I power up and the icons are back where they were before. Windows 'forgets' where I had moved them, and goes back to a previous arrangement; or worse, can't find any user-defined arrangement, and uses auto-arrange. Keeping track of icons' customized positions is a feature of Windows that has always worked before, it has just gone haywire lately.
Last night I decided to mess around a little bit. My theory was that icons' positions were recorded in C:\Windows\Profiles\Username\user.dat and backed up in ~user.da0. No amount of scandisk-ing or defragmenting had fixed the problem, so I reasoned that there was some corruption in the internal organization of the file. The errors would have been passed on to the .da0 file some time ago. So if I temporarily renamed these files, I would force Windows to create a new user.dat file from scratch, without the corruption.
This started out ok, I was asked for a lot of preferences for programs, which I expected. But Windows also created a clean set of folders for Outlook98 (email). I started pondering the fate of my saved correspondence and address book.
Gone. So before I do anything else, I would like to restore those folders. Would you or anyone know what the filenames are? There's something called Program Files\Outlook Express\wab.exe, but that doesn't seem like it. Or maybe it's the address book program, and the data is kept in another file... I would rather not restore the whole C:\ drive, as my last backup is not as recent as I would like.
I'd appreciate any help - Frank |
