since yesterday i've had three issues which all arose at the same time.
windows 7 x64, i7 2.8ghz 12gb ddr3
1 - my libraries, favorites, drives are missing...basically the entire sidebar is gone. http://i.imgur.com/m8pRQ.png. yet when i open a dialog, my libraries and drives are back to normal ONLY for the dialog.
i tried Restore Default Libraries. it works one time, but when i open libraries again i go back to the empty mess. restarting the computer temporarily fixes the problem.
2 - in the explorer window that's showing libraries, when i navigate to a certain folder i get an unending progress bar (the kind that turns the address bar green).
yesterday when the problem started, i was saving a file to this folder. the program writing the file crashed during the write and i believe that's what caused the problem. i have sugarsync backing up that folder and when i restarted the computer sugarsync informed me that its database was corrupted, so i had to uninstall and reinstall the software.
3 - icons are missing. the Rebuild Icon Cache did not fix this. http://i.imgur.com/r9pgo.png
restarting the computer temporarily fixes these problems, but when i open the directory with the initial write problem, everything stops working.
edit: i should note that i did a chkdsk /f and it repaired problems. i also did the thing that verifies then restores windows files (can't remember the command now), which reported that everything was normal.