Question Does making the "AppData" folder visible ruin my computer ?

[Garfieldwxg55]

Hi, I was installing a couple of emulators yesterday (xemu and flycast), and I store my emulators in AppData, in an Emulators folder. Anyway, flycast wasn’t showing AppData as a selectable directory for ROMs, so I made AppData visible in the file settings. This was fine initially, but when I turned on my computer this morning, a lot of strange things were happening. Outlook wasn’t able to log in, and Discord got stuck in an endless loop of checking for updates. When I tried to go to my AppData, it wouldn’t let me past my Users folder before crashing file explorer.
Could this be from making AppData visible? Or could this be some kind of virus? I’m quite worried, as I have a 4090 and a i9 12900k and I really don’t want to have ruined my PC.
Any help is greatly appreciated!

UPDATE: I can get into the AppData folder but it’s extremely slow to do anything

UPDATE 2: I did an anti-virus scan which came up with nothing. I remade the AppData file hidden and it hasn’t fixed the issue. Several game shortcuts on my desktop have lost their icons. For extra detail, here are the places I installed my emulators from:

https://xemu.app

Flycast CI Builds

flyinghead.github.io

 

[USAFRet]

and I store my emulators in AppData

Why?

Is this the normal place for these to be installed?

 

[USAFRet]

Changing the permissions on /AppData/ may not be 'permanent', and may seriously screw up the system operation.

 

[Garfieldwxg55]

No, you’re allowed to install them anywhere, but that’s where I usually prefer to install them

 

[Garfieldwxg55]

Ok, it’s good to know that it’s probably not a virus

 

[USAFRet]

No, you’re allowed to install them anywhere, but that’s where I usually prefer to install them

Well, /AppData/ is probably not the best place for this.

 

[DSzymborski]

No, you’re allowed to install them anywhere, but that’s where I usually prefer to install them

I could store my lawn mower in my bathtub, too, but I'm not sure why I'd want to. It doesn't help me in any way whatsoever and it risks being the cause of negative consequences otherwise.

 

[Garfieldwxg55]

Got it, thanks, I’ll refrain from installing emulators in AppData in the future, guess I’m a bit of a novice still haha. But what kind of situation might I be in? Safety wise? Like is it a quick do a backup and then reinstall Windows situation? Or a leave everything and all my accounts are compromised situation? Thanks again for your help!

 

[USAFRet]

Got it, thanks, I’ll refrain from installing emulators in AppData in the future, guess I’m a bit of a novice still haha. But what kind of situation might I be in? Safety wise? Like is it a quick do a backup and then reinstall Windows situation? Or a leave everything and all my accounts are compromised situation? Thanks again for your help!

Randomly changing permissions on system folders can make the whole thing unstable.

Don't install anything to AppData. Thats not what that folder is for.

 

[hotaru.hino]

AppData only affects the user for where the folder is located. It doesn't affect the system if you muck around with it. The point of the folder is to store user settings and data related to that user for applications, so as to customize the experience for that user, rather than run the potential of having conflicts with how multiple users want to use the app.

Quite a few applications do install there, namely Chrome and Electron based apps. You ever wonder why if you install say Discord or Visual Studio Code, you don't get a UAC prompt? It's because it installs in a place where the user who launched it doesn't need administrative permissions to access. The flip side however is that these apps may not show up for other users, because they don't have access to that user folder.

If you messed up your AppData folder in some way (which setting it visible shouldn't do, but mucking around with permissions might), you create a new user and use that instead. If you're really patient, you could copy and paste some of the folders over to the new user's AppData folder and some of the apps you use won't notice a thing. I do this all the time with my Firefox folder in there to effectively transfer the state of the browser (including logins and whatnot) to another machine.