I lost all of my Favorites. All of my stored links, both under the Favorites Tab and on my Favorites Bar vanished overnight. I checked my "Favorites Folder" (C:\users\username\Favorites) and it is still there, and so are all of my websites. Now, before coming here, I tried the "Restore Default Location" thing, I also tried the "Restore Previous Version" thing, and I even tried the "Reset IE" thing. Obviously nothing worked or I wouldn't be here.
As I said, this happened overnight. One day everything was just fine and, when I booted up the next day, not only were my Favorites missing, but my Desktop Icons were all translucent, and all of my Desktop Gadgets were gone and the Gadget Window will not open so that I can even try to restore them.
Right away I performed an online search and found that the "Translucent Icon" thing and found that a virus could be the culprit (at least for that part). So, I ran a full Virus Scan (which I also perform regularly every week, in addition to running Real-Time Scanning all of the time). It found 0 Viruses, 4 Trojans, 0 Rootkits, 0 Tracking Cookies, and 0 Potentially Unwanted Programs.
The desktop Icons had all been switched to “Hidden” so I was able to fix them by selecting all and unclicking “Hidden”, so that much was easy. However, I have not found any way to fix my Favorites or Gadgets problem. Someone Please help!