Help desperately needed! Saved files disappeared!

My windows 8 updated sometime this week. When I went to use the computer the next time, I noticed that everything had changed - my desktop background was reset, my startup shortcuts were missing, and google drive wasn't installed. I chopped this up to the windows update and did my work.

I saved some files to the desktop in a folder. For whatever reason, I restarted my computer. After the restart, I logged in to my user account - only to discover all of my old settings were restored.

I quickly realized that I must not have been logged into my user account previously. However, I can NOT find the files I had saved to the desktop anywhere on my C drive.

What happened? Was I logged into a guest account somehow (even though guest account was disabled)? If so, would my files have automatically been deleted? I will be crushed but I'd rather know the truth than spend more hours looking for them.

Thanks in advance.

look in your user directory and see if there are two users. I'd guess the files are there if you can find them.

Thanks. Unfortunately I had already gone through all files under "User" - nowhere in sight.

Bummer. Can you go back before the update?