My PC was behaving poorly.I suspected malware so I ran Malwarebytes and Spybot. Malwarebytes found nothing. Spybot found several pages of low-risk "threats", most of which appeared to be registry keys. I allowed it to quarantine them all. After rebooting the PC, I discovered that my Recent Documents list in both Word and Excel had been reset (cleared). Since Malwarebytes didn't do anything, I suspect it was Spybot. Is there anything I can do to restore those settings?
You could try to recover them from Quarantine. Rightclick Spybot Start Center, select Run as Administrator, then click Quarantine. I'm not exactly sure what those would be listed under, perhaps it is there under the title of Excel, Word or even Office. If you find it, checkmark each one, then click Restore Selected.
If you can't find the items, then if nothing too major was found during your scans, either now or in the past, then you could checkmark everything and restore it, if you wish.
To prevent your recent documents list from being cleared again, you could stop scanning for Usage Tracks if you like:
https://www.safer-networking.org/faq/usage-tracks/
If you'd like to stop scanning for Usage tracks, checkmark Advanced User Mode, click Settings, select the Categories tab, then rightclick somewhere in the window that the Categories are in and select Spyware Scan Only, then click Apply and OK.
If you prefer to keep scanning for Usage Tracks, then you could just uncheck the result that is the Recent Document item when Spybot is done it's scan, though I'm unsure what it is called. Perhaps it is listed as Word or Excel, then Recent document list is shown underneath of it, I'm not sure. :)
I was able to restore the setting. Thanks.
Can someone explain to me how clearing this setting makes anyone safer? Why is it even included in the list of things to reset/delete?
You're welcome. :)
I can only guess, but I would assume perhaps privacy concerns. Perhaps it could be a shared computer, and somebody might not like other users to see their recent documents list they have been working on. Or, if there is an attacker, you might not want some hacker seeing a list of your recent documents or excel files, it could be sensitive in nature, which is the basic gist of what it's saying on the Usage Track page. Same for the other Usage Tracks, in general.