Changes aren't saved... or something

Came across this odd problem recently. I rearranged my desktop icons the other day and shut it down as usual. The next day I turned my PC on the icons went back to the way there were before my rearrangement. Same goes for my gadgets since I repositioned some of them slightly and they've gone back to the original position.

I then noticed this further when I plugged in my old mouse and bumped up the pointer speed. Turned the PC off, went to bed. Next morning when loaded my pointer speed was reset to what it was before.

So clearly my changes aren't being saved... but how to remedy this? My most recent hardware change was I installed a 8600GT... but that's it.

 

Have you checked to see if your Windows profile is set to discard changes upon exit? You can verify this by going into your documents and settings (XP) and in your profile, check the NTUSER.* file. If it's a .MAN extension then change it to a .DAT extension. You may have to show hidden files to see this.

If it's not that then it's got to be a third party software setting, maybe with the newly installed 8600GT? Although I've never heard of anything like that.

EDIT: Also note that if you are not logging in as a member of the local users group then you are considered a guest and changes will not be saved, the above NTUSER check is usually manually set when using roaming profiles and/or if you are on a domain.

 

I had a poke around and found two files like that, but they are called ntuser.dat.LOG1 and ntuser.dat.LOG2. Are these the ones you're talking about? I'm on Vista x64 by the way.

Thanks.

 

Vista, ahh...

*runs away as quickly as possible pretending nothing ever happened*

/not much help in that dept sorry :-(

 

No worries lol... anyone else with ideas?