Lisa_maree - To be honest, I only recovered the word documents, nothing else. Meaning I do not know if other open or not, I should really check if I recover images if that works.
The hard drive size is 320GB with over 1TB for recovered data found and the computer was only home use only no security was added, apart from maybe users with passwords.
Not really sure what you mean about checking the drive with a hex editor for an ascii string.
Patio - I believe that size file is correct. My CV is around 24.0 KB (24,576 bytes), not a shortcut. So the files which are corrupt was correct and not shortcuts.