Hello, first off, XP has me listed as the administrator. When you mention user account, cookies, logins, encrypted files, I'm not sure if you mean Opera or XP?
I never had to have an opera.com account to use the Opera browser. I used the browser for 2-3 years. But recently I created an Opera account (after I lost the bookmarks). Some Admin Opera person, told me to go to the forums and ask for help.
About the bookmarks, there are quite a few videos on You Tube about restoring bookmarks ( any browser ). Essentially they tell you to create some HTML file and to name it something, and then export it so that you can later import it if you need to ( that is my understanding about it ). But, I never did anything like that in Opera. It seems to be something like a preventative step, for crash protection before the crash happens. And if that is what I needed to do, or if that is what you think I did, then all is lost. Nevertheless, since I never uninstalled or deleted anything why would Windows XP remove only the Opera bookmarks, and leave everything else intact?
I cant say if the location of the profile changed or not because I don't know where it was to begin with. Lastly, Opera isn't really working very well in other areas where it used to work fine, like websites that no longer load up normally, certificates that cannot be verified (I mentioned this before).
Any other recommendations? Would recovery software be able to find and restore the bookmarks if they are still on my computer?
Here is what I copied in About Opera:
Version: 36.0.2130.80 - An error occurred while checking for updates
Profile: C:\Documents and Settings\Rob\Application Data\Opera Software\Opera Stable