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The Elder · #9 (**permalink**) August 27th, 2005

I've been using LW for a little over 1 year and have had very few problems. Questions, Yes. This is my first post and I hope it is appropriate for this thread.

Two nights ago I was running LW minimized (not downloading anything). Occassionally I would check on the progress of uploads and everything seemed normal. In the mean time I was editing mp3 tags for files I wanted to add to my shared folders.

I normally share 5 folders with different type music. When I checked my shared folders in LW, four of them were missing. I checked options even though I knew uploads had been occurring from these folders all evening. The folders were no longer listed as shared. I immediately closed LW and went to my directory where these folders are kept. They were gone as well as one other folder.

I used windows to search for the folders and some of the known songs within these folders. Nothing! I opened the only folder that was still shown as shared and found 8 songs in a folder that normally has 250 or more.

I used Norton's "recover erased files" function and found most of the music that was missing from the one folder and restored them but there was nothing from the other 3 missing folders.

Norton had all of these songs as deleted but with no date stamp (unknown). Songs that I had manually deleted were also found with the correct date stamp on them.

I ran Norton virus scan, Ad-Aware and Spy-Bot no indication of problems.

I immediately contacted a local guru who has many years experience in computer security. He suggested running scandisk and restoring from a previous day in case some of the system32 files were corrupted and had lost track of the files. I did, to no avail.

The only thing unusual that I can recall is that there was a Bearshare user downloading from one these folders. LW said it was downloading but there was 0% and no time remaining. Not that unusual for a short time but this situation remained for maybe 1/2 hour and then showed download as completed. Still 0%.

The only way I know of to completely erase files from the computer is with programs designed to write zeros over the file names. Maybe I shut LW down before this process had completed zeroing out the files I did find and recover.

I never download zip or exe files with LW. My anti-virus and spyware is always up to date. I'm wondering if this is just a hijacker playing or an attempt to punish LW users.

I will definitely investigate the software identified in this thread that may thwart this kind of effort. I may be paranoid but I have no other explanation for what happened.

Any Ideas?

Thanks Hank