Program Files Vanishing

printer and chess game files POOF! gone

[Garden Variety]

I have an HP PSC all-in-one scanner/printer that has been working fine for at least two years. The last time I tried to start the software that operates the scanner it wouldn't start. I thought maybe the desktop shortcut had gotten "corrupted" so I looked in the C:/program files folder to make a new shortcut and (what-the-hell!) all of the program files to operate the printer were gone. Specifically, all the files needed for a program called the "HP Director" that controlled all of the scanning and other functions just vanished.

The exact same thing happened to a chess playing game, Chessmaster. The shortcut icon is on the desktop, but all the program files are gone.

Has anyone seen anything like this? What could be causing this?

Most irksome of all is that I have the original installation disk for the printer, but I can't get it to install. The installation program runs, but it craps out halfway through. I've tried various ways to run it and it never completely finishes the installation. Same problem with software that I downloaded from the HP website. I am not sure if this is related to the vanishing software.

[bcolflesh]

Run chkdsk on your drive(s):

[en.wikipedia.org...]

[Garden Variety]

I ran chkdsk last night and there were no problems. What should I have seen? Should the missing files have reappeared? (I doubt that, because I did try to reinstall the printer software with the original disk.)

Moving on to reinstalling the printer software:

The hangup seems to be that the computer doesn't know that the printer is there. In the installation process there's a point where it asks to make sure the printer is connected to the computer and the printer power is on. Well, it is connected and the power is on. But the installation software will only continue if I click "Install without printer connected to the comptuer" and after I click than and proceed the installation program just stops and never completes the installation.

Could there be some problem in the pinter port or the USB connection? This seems unlikely because when I uninstall the printer software and restart the computer, Windows XP pops up a "new hardware found" message which even identifies the printer correctly. When I try to install it via XP I have to use the "Have disk" option because my particular HP printer isn't listed in XP's list of printers. I put in the disk and then I get another error: XP can't find a certain DLL file on the disk. I've looked that DLL file on Google and seen recommendations to not install the printer that way, i.e., use run the installation directly from the disk. But when I do that I get the problem mentioned above.

[Garden Variety]

In case anyone's interested, here's what I had to do to finally get the printer installed:

In Control Panel / System / Device Manager I had to remove all the "devices" (one from each failed installation attempt, it seems) related to the HP printer. Not all of them were labeled as such. Some were just "USB Device". Deleting them all and then installing did the trick.