what deleted my userprofile?

[nntps2net t-online de]

hi.


somehow a userprofile for mozilla and gnome was deleted on my
RH7.3 box without any prior request.

is there anyone around who had this as well?
and would explain me what this is about/how to get it back?

this happened in detail:
i was dl a bigger file w/ some hundred megs. eventually i forgot to turn
of ethereal, that means an even bigger file, the capture, was stored on
root partition. since root partition was already almost full, the
capture file exceded the limit.
when i came back, the machine somehow hung.
i had to reboot, but wasn't able to log in as user_abc, where i dl the
file. i logged in as root,saw that the dl was stopped before finish,
just at that point, when an emergency mail was send with error "disk
full". so i deleted the bloated capture file.
logging in as user abc worked back again, but desktop configuration was
completely lost. starting up mozilla gave me a blank default navigator
and messenger, missing hundreds of links, mails, dir's, filters etc..
checked out /home/user_abc/.mozilla/default/...:
bookmarks.html and those in main dir are lost/new+blank,
mail subdir's a lá ./Mail/pop.isp.com123/. and their files Inbox, Send
etc. are there.

but how do i reintegrate them?
how came this mess, is there no protection about this case considered?
is it a bug, no other way around it or well planned on purpose?
is there any protection i can apply, assuming eventually i will once
forget root partitition state back again?


thanks in advance for your help.