thanks people, but this has got to be malware of somekind, another pc in the house suffered the same thing after a flash disk was used to transfer files to it from the first one attacked, it lost its record of music files played in media player, the my documents folder was empty, it told the users(my younger brothers) they don't have permission to shutdown their pc(another win2k machine), they have no start button,now this can't be mischief from within the house, my siblings only play games and listen to music. oh, all log files have only records of events after the incident.