My Documents disappeared

[TheClaudeTrilogy]

Hi everyone. A PC problem hit me out of nowhere and maybe someone here can help. My PC was, to the best of my knowledge, running fine. However, after restarting it I was shocked to see that everything in the "My Documents" folder has vanished. So have the bookmarks in IE. But it looks like all the other files: installed software, files saved in other directories, the various settings, are all untouched. The missing files aren't anywhere else on the machine or in the recycle bin. There was no hint of a problem in Zone Alarm, Spybot, or the XP firewall. The only irregularity I noticed is the basic Windows Explorer process. It was capitalized, "Explorer.exe" instead of "explorer.exe" After killing the process with Hijack This and restarting it it's lowercase as normal. Is there some virus or worm that masquerades as explorer.exe and messes with the system? A hardware malfunction is another idea, but what kind would only affect a couple specific folders? I already tried system restore; it was pretty much a shot in the dark since it isn't supposed to undelete saved files, and as expected it didn't acomplish anything. I guess now I'll try to see if an antivirus scan turns up any viruses, and try a file recovery app to see if I can recover anything. Well, that's all I know so far. Any input is appreciated. eMachines T1090 Win XP Home SP 2 900 MHz Intel Celeron 128 MB RAM