Vista doesn't recognize my user files or settings!!

Ok so I turned on my computer this morning, put in my password in the log-in screen as usual...
Then when windows started I noticed that my wallpaper was the original vista wallpaper, all my sidebar gadgets were just the starting ones, and that about half my desktop shortcuts were missing.
On top of that, all my documents, pictures, music, and even my bookmarks on mozilla firefox were gone!!
But oddly enough when I go into C:/users/Matt everything is where it should be. But if i use the links from the start bar, it takes me to Users/Temp folder.

What is going on??


P.S. I don't have system restore on sorry!

does it say that you are being logged on using a temporary profile? I have had this on a Vista Ultimate computer and I believe I had to change a registry setting. Let me know if it is giving you the "temporary profile" message and I will try to refresh my memory. If I recall, in my situation, there was quite a bit of info in the error log about not being able to load my profile, and loading a default one instead. On the start menu, right click "Computer", left click manage. After the UAC prompt, computer manager will come up. if you click "Event Viewer" on the left, it will display recent errors, including logon errors.

I didn't see anything in the error log that looked like a log-in error. But it totally seems like windows has me in some temporary account. especially since my other users come to this same temp account too when i log-in as them (even though it uses the account name). any idea of what i should do?

How many times have you rebooted since this happened?

is this a personal computer, or on a business network with a domain? In my experience, when the profile wasn't loaded correctly, I ALWAYS got the message that it was loading a temporary profile, but apparently that prompt does not always happen. I know that now the problem has been long resolved, but I found a couple links that looked familiar.
A temporary profile is loaded after you log on to a Windows Vista-based system
User Profile Error - Logged on with a Temporary Profile

I'd still like to know how many boot iterations this machine has gone through since the problem first occurred....

my thoughts are this - it could be a temporary thing, especially if you have not rebooted the machine at all - and thus, since you said your files are there (well, your user folder anyway) then perhaps a reboot may allow the computer to sort out what it could not figure out before and you'll be golden....

or it could be a minor registry / profile issue, a major profile issue, or even Malware....but we gotta start somewhere.

if you have tried to reboot the machine several times and this keeps happening, then look at those links that bad posted....

Well, oddly enough turning on and off my computer didn't fix the problem, but just restarting it did...

Thanks for all the help guys, if it stays fixed for the next couple of days I'll mark the topic as solved.