Control Panel

[B1Gtime]

i dont know what happened but my control panel doesn't give me the option to change/remove any programs.

Also alot of things vanished for example: CounterStrike source, TF2,Battlefield 2, FireFox,Frostwire, IE 7.0, Microsoft word....etc. all dissapeared on the control panel but still seem to work.

And 2 things got added to my control panel that i never saw before, called: Webfldrs XP, and VCRedist Setup

any clue how i get it back to normal.

[crenn]

System Restore maybe?

[B1Gtime]

I can't believe I didn't think of that.

it worked.

thx crenn, +rep

[B1Gtime]

Well it worked for that one day, now the problem is back.

ill try restoring again i guess.

[crenn]

Windows XP?

I've been noticing of late that my home laptop is having a lot of problems.... it's forgetting my user preferences (which I fix by forcefully restarting the machine).

[B1Gtime]

Yah.

Well i restored to May 19 and it seems to be fine.

thx crenn.

[nevermind1534]

Scan for viruses and spyware, if you haven't already.

[ajmilton]

That's rather indicative of a virus. I ran into this the other day with a client's PC. Some pretty nasty trojan/backdoor variant. Spybot S&D will sort out most of it, but you'll probably need to get an actual virus scanner to get some of the nastier stuff off. AVG will take care of it, as I recall. There's a few other tools out there to check for and remove the more tenacious spyware ... ComboFix, SmitFraudFix, VundoFix are the ones that I tend to use frequently. Google 'em.
Oh yeah. Until you get that fixed, you'll want to keep that computer off the internet so it won't be downloading anything else :P