I was searching for last minute holidays and got a message, looking for all purposes like a genuine windows message stating that my hard disk had issues and needed repair. Foolishly I decided that this was a genuine message and allowed it through unser accounts control. Windows Security Essentials did nothing.

Some very nasty sad low life people then downloaded the "Recovery Virus" to my machine. This evil little program purports to dagnose variuos faluts on yuor machine and then tries to chrage you for the solution. I did not pay of course, but the damage its done is nasty.
I have managed to get rid of the virus, run various scans and eventually had to do a Windows Repair install.
However, when I hit Start/All Programs - al lthe program folders are there but they are all empty.

As this is a music machine there are lots of programs that will take weeks to reinstall.

I have been trying to google around to find out what to do and apparently this nasty *&^£" program hides them all away until you pay them money to get them back. However I fear my reinstall has wiped the folder (called smtemp) from my system as I can find no trace of it.


Does anyone know a way of restoring the "All programs" folders after they have been wiped?


thanks in advance

Win 11 64, Asus Rog Strix z390 mobo, 64 gig RAM, 8700k