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spellflower

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 7, 2005
236
16
Before I went to bed last night, I set my ibook to download a buch of zip files and quicktime mpgs. I woke up at 6am and the ibook was asleep, as it should have been. I woke it up and saw just what I expected: the browser window I'd left it on, and beneath that a desktop littered with new files. Wanting to maximize my downloads during the time when I'm not using the computer for anything else, I set it to do a few more, and went back to sleep. When I woke up a few hours later, the browser window was still open, and it was still working on the last of the downloads. But that's not all....

The users window had been opened.
The other finder window that I'd minimized was closed.
And there was NOTHING on my desktop! No "Macintosh HD", nor any of the other files I usually keep there, nor any of my new downloads! (Edit: I did find those, see below; also, the desktop image was there, just no icons.)
I checked the file that had been minimized, into which I'd been sticking those new downloads, and found that some, but not all of them were in it, though I didn't put them there. I checked the trash and again found some of the zip files, but not all.

What's going on? :confused:
I should mention that I had a little disaster two nights ago in which I accidentally erased my user accounnt library, but a friend ended up helping me change the ownership and location of a library folder from a new dummy account. Could this be related? Or, as someone suspected when I reported my problem with my machine not waking up, is my ibook... POSESSED? :eek:

Edit: I went to the desktop finder file and found that all the downloads and everything else were in it. I copied the downloads to another file and put the originals in the trash, thinking that maybe when the desktop gets too crowded it just stops displaying things there, but there's still nothing on it but my background pic. How do I get all the icons to display again? And why did this happen in the first place?
 

Jaffa Cake

macrumors Core
Aug 1, 2004
19,801
9
The City of Culture, Englandshire
The first thing I'd suggest to do is to relaunch your Finder (Apple Menu/Force Quit) – I've needed to do that in the past when the Finder locked up and all my Desktop icons disappeared. The relaunch did the trick.
 

spellflower

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 7, 2005
236
16
Thanks, Jaffa Cake. So how do I relaunch finder? And do I risk losing any info or settings as a result?
 

gekko513

macrumors 603
Oct 16, 2003
6,301
1
spellflower said:
Thanks, Jaffa Cake. So how do I relaunch finder? And do I risk losing any info or settings as a result?
No, no risk involved.

Hit cmd-alt-esc, select finder and click Restart.
 

spellflower

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 7, 2005
236
16
Thanks again, gang. I don't know what I'd do without you. I love my mac, but for some reason I've been having a lot of these little issues lately. Part of it's just that I'm new to all this, I'm sure. Thanks for edumacating me! By the by, should I not crowd out my desktop to keep this from happening again?
 
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