Yeah, you don't know what you got 'till it's gone. But the mystery lingers. Why is it gone? The mystery tasks me, like a great white whale somewhere over the horizon.

I am speaking, of course, of the disastrous visit to Office Depot, as elucidated in my previous blog. I am speaking of the root cause of the fact that all my documents (actually, "most", not all) were erased from my hard drives.

The answer was staring me in the face from the day I got my computer home and painstakingly unsnarled all the cables and got everything plugged back together. There, lying innocently on the desktop among all the carnage of eviscerated folders, was this little file with the icon of a simple cogged gear. It's name was AXEL.DAV. I had no idea what it was. It seemed to me that it might be some important component of some larger application. Not understanding its purpose, I was afraid to touch it.

After a few days, I created a folder called "Wierd Stuff" and put AXEL.DAV into it. Nothing bad happened. As the days went by, my fear that it might have some critical function waned. Last weekend, I confidently erased it. Nothing bad happened.

Last night, I had to go "dumpster diving" for some reason. That's what I call it when I have to manually inspect the contents of folders and subfolders that I am unfamiliar with. There I was, blindly searching way down deep inside "Programs and Settings", and I noticed a file... AXEL.DAV.

That's funny. What's that doing down here? I went up one level in the folder-tree. And there it was again... AXEL.DAV. In three minutes I found another dozen clones of that little cogged gear.

A chill ran up the back of my neck. I hate it when that happens. Because it usually means that 1) I'm about to discover something really bad, and/or 2) I'm about to realize that I have been really stupid.

It suddenly occured to me that I should Google that file name. Yeah, that's obvious to you! Shut up. So, I googled AXEL.DAV.

Did you know there was a virus called AXEL.DAV? Hunh? Didja? Didja? Really? Shut up.

There were a jillion hits on AXEL.DAV. The first three told me all about this little booger, how it searches out certain documents, notably Word and Excel files, and erases them, leaving behind its calling card, the 4K file, AXEL.DAV. A fourth website told me how to get rid of the nasty booger, and that took all of four minutes.

It is nice to know. It's nice to know why this mysterious thing happened to me. It's nice to have figured it out by myself. Shades of Sherlock! It's also a bit embarrasing that it took three freakin' WEEKS to figure it out.

When did my PC get infected? Obviously, right there in Office Depot, after the "PC Checkup" verified that my computer was clean of all bug-uglies, and during the attempt of that young employee to download and execute a new mouse driver. So, he didn't do it on purpose. There was no malicious intent. He just did something stupid. I can forgive that.

I just got off the phone with the manager at Office Depot. He really, really, no kidding, REALLY appreciated finding out how my machine got wiped. It was a mystery to them, too. Now, a mystery solved.

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