Fortunately, I was able to get mine back. They’d been moved to a sort of ghost file system, and I just had to move them back to the regular desktop. The ghost file system is still there, and it’s hard to find things sometimes, but everything still exists. (And now it exists in a couple more places than it did before, just to be safe.) Not everyone’s been so lucky.
The update that happened a couple of days ago (today being May 24, 2018) sparked a whole bunch of new traffic to the thread. Now people are getting nonfunctional desktops, or black screens. The numbers of people who report having the same problem is up to 205. One of the people who posted in the thread was a tech guy who said that the same thing happened to eight of his customers, and the only thing he can do is pull their hard drives, copy the important files, and reinstall Windows 10. And the Microsoft people agree that yes, this is the thing that has to be done, even if it costs you money, even if they were the ones who caused it in the first place.
I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re using Windows 10, do not go gentle into that good update. Postpone it and back things up, preferably externally. Probably you’ll be all right, 205 out of all the people who use Windows is infinitesimal, but something is going very wrong with some of these updates, and Microsoft doesn’t seem to be taking it seriously, even though people are losing data.
This is happening to me and it’s suffering. Please please please don’t let this shit update until they figure this out
So something that I did not mention here: I tried to update my computer on Monday night. I did not lose my files! Instead, I ended up with a completely non-functioning OS! As in, could not even get past the “select keyboard layout” screen to load the login page kind of non-functioning. Eyyyyyyy.
For the record, if this happens, and you, like me, stupidly did not make a system restore point before trying to update and therefore cannot rollback changes, do everything you can to get it to that blue screen that allows you to boot in safe-mode, whereupon you will be able to access the options to reset the entire thing while still keeping your files (it’s somewhere under Troubleshoot, iirc).
It will pretty much uninstall everything and go back to the initial version of the OS, stick a nice little list of everything it uninstalled on your desktop, and leave you with a now-functioning computer and all your files intact.
You will then have to spend a few hours reinstalling everything, but all things considered, I think I got off lightly.
….ooooorrr you could do the smart thing and create a system restore point before doing any major updates. Don’t be me, folks
ETA:
If you cannot find the option to reset, you are not actually on the right screen, even if it otherwise looks identical. I know because I had to try multiple times before I had those options available to me. Keep trying.
E(again)TA:
How to Disable or Turn Off Windows Update in Windows 10
Nava 