'All Programs List' problems with Windows XP

[Guest]

I thought I was SOOO smart.  I thought I was being tech-saavy.  I thought I had passed the threshold between geek-wannabe and true geekdom.

I used a seperate 4gig hard-drive for my OS.

This has turned out to be a bit of a hassle.  I am constantly running into a memory ceiling, at which I have to go through and manual delete a lot of stuff.  This has happened three times now, approximately three to four months in between.

Yes, yes, I do constant disk-cleanups and defrags.

Anyhoo...the first couple of times this happened, I went through the OS and deleted unnecessary files willie-nillie.  Everything was fine.

This time, however, I seemed to have screwed up a little bit.  Not enough to ruin the functionality of the OS, mind you, but just enough to REALLY PISS ME OFF.

For some reason, my 'All Programs List' went from showing every application currently installed on the computer to only showing a few.  In addition, new programs installed since this debacle do not show up on the List.

Any ideas?  I do NOT want to do a complete wipe/install of Windows XP.

I suppose I could restore to my last point...but this seems almost as bad as a complete wipe/install.

[bill corcoran]

check these directories:

\Documents and Settings\
and
\Documents and Settings\All Users
(where is probably C:)

in there should be a folder called "start menu" or something similar.  and, you guessed it, the one in "All Users" is for everybody, and the one in your username folder is just for you.  now, these are just shortcuts and must come from somewhere, so you can either try and find them in a similar directory, from a similar computer, or reset them by hand.  i haven't heard of any utility (builtin or otherwise) that does this, though i don't really use windows, so i've never looked.  might be worth a google.

[Guest]

Actually, I found out what it was.  I had previously checked all major folders to show hidden files, in an attempt to delete every last scrap of crap off my C drive.  I had forgotten to uncheck them.  Once I did this, everything magically reappeared on my APL.