Snip & Sketch suddenly useless!

Yeah, I had to do a sys restore yesterday, because I did something stupid that really fouled things up: I was in a This PC window and was annoyed by the fact that my User name was showing along with other things in the Navigation pane, and I went to the View ribbon to change things and saw Hide Selected items up there and I (without thinking) clicked my User name in the Nav pane and then clicked Hide Selected, and was startled and appalled to suddenly realize that a conversion of a zillion files and folders to Hidden was taking place. Yikes! Then everything went wonky on my desktop.

Now, I figured that what I had just done by accident was recorded in the registry, and that I could undo what I'd just done by restoring an earlier registry (that was only a few hours old).

All was apparently well when the restore finished, but then this morning I tried to use S&S, and when it flailed and failed, I went through all the stuff reported in #1 above, including yet another sys restore.

Whatcha think? Restore from my latest MR image? Drastic but necessary?

Thanks again for hanging in there, er, here.

[update a while later]

Will an Admin Command Prompt with attrib -s -h "C\<my user name>\*" /s /d do it?

Now, I figured that what I had just done by accident was recorded in the registry, and that I could undo what I'd just done by restoring an earlier registry (that was only a few hours old).

Safest bet is to restore the image.
Make sure you have a backup of any data that has been updated or created since your image first, so you can restore that. The most complete way of doing that, of course, is to create another image - or differential image if you're using those- of what you have now.

Then restore the older image, then you can mount the newest image and copy back updated data from it. That way there's no chance of leaving something out.

Man, you give good advice!

OK, so I'm going to make a disk image and then restore my most recent other disk image (6 days old). My images contain all of the partitions on Disk0, so there are the two small ones and the C: drive and the D: drive.

It's been years since I last did this. Is there anything special I need to do other than shut down Malwarebytes, right-click my mrimg file and click Restore?

The only partition you're interested in here should be your Windows partition.

To restore that (are you using Macrium?) you need to boot your PC from a Macrium bootable disk.

Think- you can't replace the Windows partition with Windows running...

You might want to find an internet guide or a youtube video.

Mm, @Edwin, only towards the end of it - post #11- has Wisewiz stated what may have led to this. User intervention - blame MS for making the O/S vulnerable.

Of course "Windows 11" will be invulnerable by comparison... won't it?

@dalchina

I'm baaaack! The main machine is beautiful, the files and folders that were Hidden when I looked before are now NOT, and the silly Snipe & Snatch app is working just as well as it ever did.

I tried my CD labelled Bootable Macrium Reflect 7.3.5672 09 Mar 2021, and nothing happened when I switched to that drive to boot. Dunno.

Booted again into the injured OS (injury inflicted by yours truly, of course, with a stupid impulse-click) and used MR to build a flash drive rescuer. That worked very well, indeed, and very soon, I was back in the proverbial saddle again.

The restore operation was surprisingly fast, even though I'm running the free edition without the delta option.

The experience with the CD probably has a moral: one way to rescue yourself is not always adequate. Some life rafts sink.

Thank you in spades for your gracious patience and your generous tenacity. I'll click the thumb, of course.

Dan

if only climate change could be solved so readily... now you need to make sure any data is up to date by mounting your newest image backup. (Options Restore, Explore Image, browse to image file...).