I turned on my computer last night and all the shortcuts on my desktop don't work. My email program is gone. My Microsoft essentials is gone. My dvd drive is gone. I'm really freaking out here. I don't know what to do or what caused it. Can someone try to help me please. I forgot to mention that I'm using windows 7 64 bit.

Cathy

Cathy,can you do a system restore to the pc when everything worked good.
Richard

I tried a system restore last night and the only restore point that was there was for yesterday afternoon. Hence it didn't work. The problem was still there.

ok I fixed my email by choosing repair windows essentials. I guess I'll have to just reinstall some of my programs. It's boggling my mind why it happened in the first place.

Hard to know.
It could be due to a virus.
It could be due to a failing hard drive.

I had a nasty virus a few years ago that got rid of most of the icons on my desktop along with creating other miscellaneous havoc. I would definitely run a thorough scan with Malwarebytes, Cathy, just to ascertain that a virus didn't cause these problems.

Do you have a link to the free malwarebytes ?

http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/
But I wouldn't trust an antivirus or anti-malware program that's run on an infected computer. Once they've infected a computer, some virus can control what the antivirus is able to detect. That may or may not be the case here. But if MalwareBytes doesn't find anything, that doesn't mean you're not infected.

Thank you Jenny.

Good luck, Cathy.
See what it finds.

I agree with Jenny. Cathy, can you download Malwarebytes to another computer and transfer it to a flash drive? You can run it in Safe Mode from a flash drive.

Malwarebytes also has something called Malwarebytes Chameleon that you can try.

Running Malwarebytes on an Infected System

Thanks, Draclvr.
I didn't know about MalwareBytes Chameleon.

I didn't either until a few weeks ago when I was working on an infected computer. It was news to me, but a great find and it worked.

That's great info, Drac. I didn't know about Chameleon and am very glad to find out about it.

Me too!! I booked marked that link
thanks Drac