I got in touch with GoDaddy (hosting company) and they discovered a new database had been created as if thiswas a new install... we hooked up the old one, thank God it was still there... and the site works but very slowly. I created a new user as admin and the system accepted it but with the requitred profile info for registered user... nonetheless it works now as admin... however the databases are VERY slow... five minutes to openthe site... etc.

In hte database manager i see that it says that DSN is not installed nor is ASP SCHEMA... do I need these installed? Does dnn use these? I also noticed that the table on users in roles was empty... is that normal as I have configured roles for a number of users...

Thanks, I have now recovered everything and recreated the users roles etc. and they all show up in the tables... You are right they have to do with Microsoft tool sets that some use, I don't.  As to how the whole thing disappeared, I am quite perplexed.

The fact that a new database had been created and the site returned to the install default pages built by the templates used for the skin is really quite worrying...  Luckily the recycle bin had the pages in reasonably good shape was a plus. GoDaddy was a great help and gave me patient help showing me how to access the SQL tables etc.

Go Daddy offered that it looked like it was a script attack through the browser... I later discovered that the Ask toolbar that had loaded itself into Motzilla had also added a surprise.... a pop-up with advertisements that identified text in the aspx files and then added a script right into the file code that caused one or more words to become links to advertisements. I wonder if a similar mechanism was used to cripple the site.

Oh yes, when I got to the SQL tables I discovered that the admin user was completely gone. So I created a new one. I think it would be wise if the retrieve admin/su passwords would tell you directly if they fail because the role was not present...