So I came home and stumbled upon a bit of a mystery. When I got home my brother was using my desktop PC that was running Windows 7 (I have accounts for my 2 brothers and my mom on the machine, but mine is the only admin account). After he finished his game he logged out and I logged in to my account, but found only strangeness.

My windows account seems to have been somewhat "reset", meaning:

• my quick launch shortcuts were gone
• my dropbox account did not automatically login
• my pidgin accounts were no longer there
• I had to relogin Steam
• iTunes could not launch (I had hooked up my iDevice before logging in)
• The Documents/Pictures/Music shortcuts in the start menu no longer work

However, despite that:

• my desktop wallpaper was still correct
• my documents folder was still there in c:\Users\my account name\My Documents as expected
• Google Chrome settings seem to have been retained
• other accounts on the same machine seem to be fine

I asked my brother if he had installed anything strange during the day, he only installed Yahoo Messenger. I last used the machine around 24 hours ago and it was fine then.

I'm not sure what else has been affected. I'm inclined to just create a new admin user for me to use, but I'd like to have some idea of what actually happened.