highjacked?

My daughter has a 1 yr old Sony laptop with Vista Home Basic and it's on a
wireless secured network. She downloads pics from her camera and places them
in the My Pictures folder. Last week she noticed that her pictures and pic
folders were missing and in their place pictures she has no idea where they
came from or who the pics are of. Other folders and files appear intact.
After a complete search, including recycle bin, her pic files and folders
were nowhere to be found.
The firewall is always on, updates are automatic and programs AWG, Adaware
and Spybot are updated regularly, run and no signs of problems.

The only thing that may have been unusual was she temporarily switched her
wireless access temporarily to an unsecured network (secured one was not
working).
Any idea what might have happened or how the pics could have been downloaded
without her knowledge?

Thanks for feedback.
Rob

Rob wrote:

My daughter has a 1 yr old Sony laptop with Vista Home Basic and it's on a
wireless secured network.

(snip multipost)

You've multiposted this into an XP newsgroup. You already have an answer in
the Vista newsgroup to which you also posted. Please don't multipost; it
makes more work for everyone and will get you *less* help, not more. See
this for why:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossposting
http://www.blakjak.demon.co.uk/mul_crss.htm - multiposting

Go back to the microsoft.public.windows.vista.security newsgroup and finish
the thread there.

Malke
--
MS-MVP
Elephant Boy Computers - Don't Panic!
FAQ - http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/#FAQ