[tragic]

Just received a help email from a friend in the states. I am at a loss as to what the problem may be, so hopefully someone here may have an idea.

This is what i received:

These files all have the same date and time. The date goes back to july. Somehow these set of files have been converted to a different format. They are different types of files. For instance one is HL_file. Another is DL_file. Another is INX file. How can I convert them back?
I have gone back to before Christmas. Its not helping me. I dont even come up with the music files I had downloaded at that time. I have a bunch of files I dont recognize. They are in a format I cant read. I cant tell you how upset I am. This has just been one real bad weekend. The system restore is not working on my documents. Besides calling it quits with the whole idea of computers what can I do?
If I go snooping into the system and look under video drivers I see files similiar to these. I'm soooooo confused.

She is referring to the files in her documents folder, which seem to have all been changed. System restore refuses to change back the my docs folder as it was.

She is unable to open any files or whatever in her docs folder as they all have changed to these different formats. I have included a couple of screen shots of her docs folder which she sent me.

This ONE

and

This ONE

Her system specs are as follows: Pentium 4 1.7Ghz, WinXP Home/SP1,Nvidia GeForce2 MX/MX400, 256RDAM, onboard sound card, and one 80G HD. The Computer is a Dell Dimension 8200.

Grateful for any feedback that may uncover this mystery.

Many thanks.

[Necrosis]

Yup the old P2P file changing deal. You really can't get these files back. I'd recommend her scrub the sytem down and reload.

[digitalwanderer]

Originally posted by Necrosis
Yup the old P2P file changing deal.

Could you elaborate on that a bit please? I don't use P2P so I have no clue as to what you're talking about, but it sounds like a virus to me.

I'm seriously interested in finding out more about this "P2P file changing deal"....sounds like another good reason to avoid P2P.

[UberLord]

Originally posted by highwayman

She is referring to the files in her documents folder, which seem to have all been changed. System restore refuses to change back the my docs folder as it was.

However, those files look like nVidia Detonator installation files.
You sure that's from the directory she has problems with?

[radTube]

I agree with UberLord that those files seem to be detonator installation files... Maybe she just extracted them into the docs folder by accident? That would explain the same date and all. And maybe she just misplaced her own files too? System restore won't return any documents she's deleted. It's not even supposed to.

Digital, don't take this "P2P file changing deal" too seriously. I've never even heard of it and I've been using P2P sharing programs (Direct Connect mostly) for a coupla years now. If that's what he's referring to.

[UberLord]

I think he's refering to an exploit in Kazaa where you get access to the users "Shared Folder". Apparently, some idiots shared their entire hard drives

[tragic]

Thanks for the replies,

Yup the old P2P file changing deal. You really can't get these files back. I'd recommend her scrub the sytem down and reload.

Not sure on that one.

I know she updated her nvidia drivers in July, and as was posted, i hope she did not install into her docs folder. But appartently, this has just happened recently, ie last weekend.

I cannot imagine that she installed the drivers there since july and this weekend all goes to wrong.!!

She has run an virus check which came up clean and she has BOClean installed. No alarm has been triggered.

Do you think this files in her docs folder are useless now?

Again many thanks for the help.

[tragic]

well i reckon Necrosis may have a point on this one but cannot get any further info on it.

Come back and enlighten us.