This whole saga reminds me of the time I somehow ended up with Windows 9x's "Recent Documents" feature pointed at the root of a drive, so when I pushed the button to "clear recent documents" it dutifully started deleting all the files on the drive.
At the time, the "Recent Documents" feature created shortcuts to, as you might guess, recently opened documents and put them in a user folder specifically for that purpose. Clearing them was only supposed to remove the shortcuts.