Win2000-Disappearing and Altered Folders

[hellgate]

I cleaned up a friend's computer by installing SpyBot, SpywareBlaster, and Norton SystemWorks 2003. Did a disk cleanup and also a Speedisk. I also removed the W.32 Blaster worm and verified in a followup run of the procedure that the worm had been removed. Everything was working fine...

Then, next day, I downloaded and installed all the Windows 2000 updates (He didn't know about Windows update.). Didn't install recent Office updates to his MSO2000, SP1. My friend's machine is a 400MHz Dell Latitude with 256MB RAM and performs pretty well. It used to be connected with a network, but he's using it now as a stand-alone.

After Windows update, we noticed that his folders in My Documents had changed to shortcuts which don't work, and one of the folders - the most important one containing all his Excel work files - disappeared. When we click on a previous document in Excel from the File menu to open it, we get the error message indicating the file either has been changed or removed. I've tried searches (F3) as well as painstakingly going through other folders in the C: drive. No luck. I can't think of anything I did which would have caused this.

There was a popup called "Endads" which came up each time we ran IE, and it also popped up several times while Windows update was cooking.

Can anyone please help?

 

[soaplover]

I think it's no way windows update did this .
Perhaps some to heavy removals in the SpyBot, SpywareBlaster, and Norton SystemWorks 2003 registry cleanups did it
My advice is to take the system restore back and do it all over .

//Regards Soaplover

 

[soaplover]

Sorry if W2K merge the backup of registry back (that is if you have one ).

//Regards Soaplover