I've been using my Win XP machine (part of a domain) over the holiday period, so until yesterday it hadn't rebooted for about five days. I used it yesterday perfectly fine and shut it down. When I switched it on this morning the majority (but not all) of my shortcut links in the Quick Launch toolbar showed as generic file icons. If you open the folder and get properties on one of the failing shortcuts it says ''Target type: This is not a valid shortcut''.

Then in Outlook I noticed my signature wasn't showing (I checked my sent folder and the sig was ok yesterday). Checking the signature folder, I can't see the security tab on any of the sig files, and I have an access denied message on trying to open them. I can see the security tab on the signature folder itself, just none of the contents. If I try and use the parent folder's security tab and ''Replace permission entries on all child objects with entries shown here that apply to child objects'' it appears to work fine, but makes no actual difference. I logged in as administrator and saw that the owner of the files showed up as a GUID (clearly should've been my account in its place).

Any ideas what might have made that happen? So far I haven't heard any similar complaints from anyone else at the office...