Hi. I am unfortunately rather uneducated about computers these days. I used to know enough to get into trouble, but I’m afraid I haven’t kept up with things, and have been left behind. That said, I have problems with my computer deleting my browser. I searched and found one other issue regarding this and only found one, from 2015, and it was closed, but I did not benefit from reading it.

I downloaded and installed the Opera browser and pinned it to my bar, and it worked well for weeks. Then one morning it was gone. I looked in the Windows program list in their little window icon in the corner and it was gone. I searched for it and Windows found nothing. I opened the downloads folder and even the .exe I had initially used had vanished. I downloaded it again and pinned the shortcut to the bar, and the next time I looked for it it was missing. This happened several times. Eventually something one of my children had been doing on my browser remained in the recent folder so I tried opening that before reinstalling and it opened the browser. Pinned the shortcut, but the next time I used the computer the shortcut was gone again. I followed this routine a few times to get my browser back and noticed that if the window didn’t get closed the pinned shortcut remained in the bar, but was not the O but looked like a document. If the browser got closed attempting to reopen gave me an error, which I did not think to write down and have no recollection as to what it said. But the browser was gone again.

This morning I was greeted with files in the download folders all claiming to be Opera web documents, all open in my son’s Chrome, but when opened from there did open my Opera.

I am irritated that I must look for my browser every time I use the computer. I am concerned that by opening it this way I am creating future problems with broken code or something. I am also under the impression that reinstalling it regularly is just filling up my hard drive with useless garbage and random lost files, and I have an old computer with barely enough space for Windows 10 and don’t want to be making more trouble than I can deal with.

Is there a thread that addresses this issue? Please let me know where and I will look at that and see if I can fix this inconvenience without further ado. If not, please form your answers in a manner an ID10T can understand.
Thanks
PrincessIncognito