It works.

Fired up my newer pc this evening, logged in, and it said 'preparing windows'. Took forever. Some reason it changed all my personal settings - almost like it was new out of the box.

But no files were lost - they were hard to find though. Some sort of forced-windows-update must have done this. Or maybe an HP update?

So, I restored from 2 days ago and everything is back to what it was. Still a scare.