Ok, here is a curly one, and i cannot find the answer.

one of my older less computer savvy customers came to me yesterday, saying he could not get past a message on his screen, everything looked different and asked if i could help, i said sure.
so i got to his place and turned on the computer, and it looked like it had been restored to out of the box settings, apart from many of his programmes such as firefox, chrome etc still ebing present, his taskbar had lost all customisations, as had his desktop, there was no pictures, documents or bookmarks, nothing. he mentioned his wife had got some spam or something, and they clicked around to get out then this happened, that’s all I had to work with.

so with no clue as to how it happened, I could not work backward. with never having seen this before I could not say oh, this is because..., and nothing I could find on Google search reflected what had happened.

so I used system restore to take it back 2 days as that was the most recent restore point available and at a time when it was known to be working.

and presto, all the settings, preferences, customisations, documents, pictures bookmarks all came back. I did a restart, it still worked so we turned it off. later that day, he turned it on still ok, did dome work, turned it off, came back turned it on, back to square one again, I talked him through doing what I did, it worked again, and I said just to leave it on till we can figure out what is causing the reset.

each restore point is created just before a 'critical update', could this be the cause? I did this at around 10.30am yesterday, the restore point I used was just before a critical update on the 17th at 1645 and when he went to restore I told him to use the same one, but, he said there were new ones there exactly the same from the 19th but at a later time in the day.

I am puzzled, I would like to fix the problem permanently not just temporarily.

can any one advise.