This is a weird problem I've never run into in the past and I'm hoping someone can tell me what's happening. My system seems to be running normally and everything responds as it should while I'm on the computer however when I restart the computer after making changes or installing new software none of the changes show up. It's as if I was running in a sandbox or virtual program and all the changes were never applied. Deleted Desktop icons are back, downloaded files and programs saved on the Desktop are gone and newly installed programs are not there anymore. It's really strange, it's as if the computer is restarting at a restore point prior to the reboot. I downloaded IE8 and Firefox 3 and installed them and even used them until the restart when they were no longer there. I downloaded a couple of programs and used them but on restart all traces of them were gone. I have a virtual program named Returnil on my computer and I suspected that it was running in the background but I checked and it was disabled. I looked on the System Processes and could see no programs running that would affect that I was doing. If I save downloads to my hard drive they are still there when I restart but if the program was installed it is gone. It's as if the computer is restarting at a previous restore point about a month ago. That is about the time I blew my motherboard and about a week ago I installed a new motherboard. The new motherboard is the same as the old one and everything booted up perfectly with the exception that a message popped up saying "new hardware had been detected". After a moment a message popped up saying "new hardware installed" and everything worked fine after that. Is it possible that the BIOS on the new motherboard needs to be changed in some way? I don't know how that could be making the system restart at a earlier restore point but I'm grasping at straws here.
Here's my system:
WinPro SP2
AMD Athlon CPU
ASUS socket A motherboard
Via KT600 chipset
1.5GB DDR RAM
200GB WD HDD system boots off this drive
200GB WD HDD mirror image of drive C (copied with XXClone)
I didn't reinstall or repair WINXP as it worked fine after installing the new motherboard. Could the motherboard be defective somehow? I bought it on e-Bay but it was listed as new. The only other anomily is that my floppy drive does not show up on the drive list under WinExplorer or spin up when I put a disk in the drive. All other DVD and CD drives appear to work normal as do both hard drives and the two external USB hard drives I have connected. I suspect I forgot to plug in the power cable to the floppy drive or the board is defective but I haven't taken the time to open the box and check the cables yet. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.