I messed my computer up...Here's what happened...

After updating my graphics driver I was receiving an error message every time I booted up to Windows 8 that said something along the lines of Catalyst Control Center has encountered an error and has to close. Naturally, I wanted to fix this problem. I found a few different ideas, but none of them worked. I eventually found an HP.com forum that told me to do the following:

"Navigate to c:\ and right click on Users. Select properties. Under the General tab, look at the bottom for the Hidden selection. If there is not a check mark in the box, place a check mark there. Hit apply, select yes to apply to all subdirectories. If you clicked ok, you may notice that it disappeared from the right pane once it finishes. It should still be listed under the tree on the left. Right click on it again. This time remove the check mark and apply to all subdirectories."

Three people said that this fix worked for them so I figured I'd give it a shot. Well, now I can't open other programs that worked just fine before I hid and unhid all of the folders in the Users folder...these programs include iTunes, Google Earth Pro, and Microsoft Mouse and Keyboard Center for starters. And worst of all, I'm still receiving the Catalyst Control Center error on start-up.

Next, I tried to revert to a restore point from the day before I made these changes. System Restore failed, telling me that it "could not access a file - probably because antivirus software is running..." Well, all I have is Windows Defender so I shut that off. Same thing happened. Then I thought, ooh, I have a partitioned HDD with Windows 7 and Avast antivirus software on the other side so maybe I'll just boot up over there and turn it off, just in case that is somehow blocking access to a file. I did that, then restarted into Windows 8 and all of my restore points were GONE. I found a forum that told me this is a common problem - that booting into Windows 7 will delete Windows 8 restore points. Great, so now I can't even try that...

Then, I decided I would just reinstall all of the programs that weren't working. I uninstalled iTunes and reinstalled it - still won't open...when the programs won't open I get this simple message: "iTunes has stopped working - A problem caused the program to stop working correctly..." iTunes asks if I want to send an error report, but none of the other programs do. I can access this error report, but it doesn't tell me anything that makes any sense to me.

So, here is my question: What did I mess up by hiding and unhiding all files and folders in the Users directory and how do I fix it???

I would just back-up my files and reinstall Windows 8, but the disks are at home and I am off at school so I'm hoping there is a logical fix here and I don't have to go through the trouble of acquiring the disks...

Thanks for the help!

This might be the problem: All of my folders say "Read Only (Only applies to files in folder)." But it appears that I can edit any file I please, so I don't really know what that's actually doing...

Also, I just tried to watch a movie on the Netflix app and it says "Whoops, something went wrong... It appears that this computer does not have the latest Windows Updates installed...including Update 2768703..."

Of course, looking back through my Update History I find that Update KB2768703 was installed with the first set of updates that I downloaded when I originally set Windows 8 up on this computer.

Does this shed any light on the situation? I really have no idea what's going on, but I get the feeling that I really screwed things up and I'll need to start from scratch...

Hi,

According to your description, as far as I know, hid user contents was not useful to Catalyst Control Center problem.

Firstly, you need to set the User Properties to default setting, Please refer to the screenshot.

Secondly, as there is a problem with Catalyst Control Center. You can try to uninstall it in control panel,  then restart computer and use system default graphic driver for test.

If there is still no use, you can try to create a new user account for test.

If you need further assistance on this particular issue or any other Windows related issue, let us know and we will be glad to assist you.