To be perfectly honest, this sounds like virus activity to me. One that tends to sit dormant for some period of time, then start messing with things. In this case, putting everything into zip files, which will (if they aren't already) be encrypted and password protected forcing you to reformat.
Might be a very prudent thing to be sure your virus scanner is up to date and run a full system scan.
So here is my problem. Yesterday I ran defrag and some system clean-up suff, and I must have done something wrong. Now there are THOUSANDS of .zip files all over my computer. Every file I open up has some (three or four in the start menu, three or four in each of my "favorites" files, lots in my pictures and in each individual CD file in my music, in my documents, in every single program file, the list goes on). Some were even sent to be burned onto my CD drive and some are on my desktop!
My computer is RAMPANT with .zip files (oh, and a FEW are .exe files, too) with names like xnwguykhvjcru.zip. Oh, and I have about 40 pictures (.bmp, .jpg, and .gif) missing from my pictures file. QUESTION: What did I do, and how do I fix it?!?! Please, dear God, someone help me. (I'm not kidding about the thousands of files, I searched and I found about 3200 total)

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