2017.1.2 data corruption

I think I know what caused it. So first off the issue is that the ui for my game, which is a single canvas with a bunch of panels and under it along with around 40 linked component fields, all of the component field references were lost. Objects are there just the references were removed.

What I think caused this is when I deleted the VS solution and project files. After upgrading VS I was having issues with intellisense not recognizing stuff correctly. So figured just let unity rebuild the solution, which did solve that problem.

The two should not be connected, but I can't think of anything else that could have done this.