Vista - Programs Disapearing after shutdown

I've been having a problem recently with Windows Vista Premium which is
driving me up the wall.
I only got my new laptop about a week and a half ago and everything has been
great, but recently (last 4 days) whenever I turn my laptop back on in the
mornings, my programs have disapeared. Not all of them, but ususally the most
recent ones. The desktop icons dissapear and are are replaced with "file"
icons. When I go to the start menu and programs, the program folders are
there, but when I open one of these programs, my laptop tells me 'the item
that this shortcut refers to has been moved or is no longer available' .
When this first happened I re-installed my missing programs and they all
worked fine again. Then when I turned my laptop on again the next morning, I
had the same problem.
I've ran spybot today and also did a quick norton scan but no viruses or
spyware was found. Im at my wits end and I dont want to keep having to
download these files again.

On Sep 12, 12:18 pm, JrShankill <JrShank...@xxxxxx>
wrote:That is a really strange one.
It sounds like your programs are getting automatically deleted or
moved.
make sure there isn't any rogue batch file in your startup or
something that is automatically deleting or moving files/folders
during the reboot.
make a test folder and a couple of test text files then after they
disappear, do a search and see if they where deleted/renamed/moved.
The hard part will be finding the process that is responsible.
also check what was installed 4 days ago in the "add remove programs"
settings box.

Good luck
crzzy1