Vista - system restore created new (empty) user accounts.

Greetings all,

I have an HP Pavillion that is just a year old. It is running Vista Home Premium 64bit .

Just days ago, something happened to cause the computer to not be able to wake up the monitor after doing a power save. I had to turn off the computer at the power switch and then reboot in order to be able to use the machine.

After much investigation, I could not find a solution to the problem, so then decided to restore to a previous restore point.

After doing the restore, all of my user accounts (including admin) became inaccessible. They all show up on the welcome screen, but when I click on one, the system builds a new profile for the account (and names it username.computername).

The old account folders are still there under c:\users but the system has created new folders for the newly named accounts. I cannot log in as the old user and so all of my user files are inaccessible.

What's more, when logged in as the (new) admin user, I cannot see anything in the control panel and when I right click on "computer" and go to properties, I get the busy cursor for a few seconds and then it returns to normal without taking me to the computer properties.

I noticed that the "software license" service is currently stopped, but I do not have permission to start it even with the admin account.

I am baffled by this one. Any help would be appreciated.

- G