[audreyjoy]

I have recently installed Ad-Aware and last night it gave me a message that there were 27 items that it flagged. I told it to take the recommended action and everything seemed fine.

HOWEVER, this morning, when I went onto Outlook, it was as though it had just been installed, ie; there were no Identities, it had nothing filled in for the mail server, the contact list was gone and all of my emails were gone.

Then, I went on the internet explorer in order to go to my ISP to get the necessary information to update Outlook and I found that my IE has also been re-set. It looked like a whole new version. The history was gone (of course, the cookies were gone), the menus had all changed.

I found the information I needed from my ISP to put into Outlook, but it still didn't work. It gave me an error message. I copied the error message and opened Word to paste it in order to save it, and GUESS WHAT?? Word has changed also. I had previously made changes to my normal template, and had customized my menus and the paper-clip guy, but these changes were all gone.

I am in a TOTAL quandry as to what happened, and how to recover. I was unable to find a customer support site on Lavasoft. Does it even sound like the problem is due to Ad-Aware?

[Advertisements]

Ad-Aware should have an undo option as IIRC it quarantines what it removes.
Programs like these can be dangerous if, with all due respect, you don't know what you're doing with them. Just like driving is dangerous until you've been taught how to do it.

[Neil Jones]

Ad-Aware should have an undo option as IIRC it quarantines what it removes.
Programs like these can be dangerous if, with all due respect, you don't know what you're doing with them. Just like driving is dangerous until you've been taught how to do it.

[audreyjoy]

I am unable to find any undo function. I chose Ad-Aware because it seemed "idiot-proof". Just install and it does the rest.

[Broni]

IMHO, Ad-aware is one of the tools of the past. Personally, I don't recommend it.

[audreyjoy]

Can you offer some advice as to what I SHOULD do? Is there something I should be doing other than using Ad-Aware? Any suggestions about recovering to where I was before?

[Broni]

I don't use Ad-aware, but from what I just read, it doesn't have undo option (I may be wrong, though; you may check help files).
Since all mess happened in non-Windows files/applications, I see no way to undo those changes, and recover what was lost.

As for antimalware tools, I recommend two:
Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware: http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php
SUPERAntiSpyware Free for Home Users: http://www.superantispyware.com/

[audreyjoy]

I'll check those out. Thanks.

By the way, I finally got a reply from Lavasoft. They say that their product wouldn't do that, but I haven't changed anything else, so I can't imagine what could have happened.

Thanks for your help.

[Broni]

They say that their product wouldn't do that

It'd be a miracle to hear different answer....