Missing files after deleted registry entries and system restore. Please help!

[deliciousmix]

Hello, I have done one of the stupidest things in the world and have been trying all day to recover my files that went missing.  Here's what happened:

I deleted a bunch of registry entries because Spybot S&D always showed these five things as threat level 5 and can't clean them.  I decided to search the registry for the string of numbers and letters that S&D referred to and deleted all of the ones it would let me delete.

I also deleted all of the files and folders in the location Users/HomeAppData/Local/Temp except the one file it wouldn't let me delete.

When I came back to Windows nothing was working so I rebooted.  When I rebooted all of my programs, files, everything was gone.  I did a system restore to the most recent point which was from a week ago which turned everything back to normal except some very important files are missing from a folder on my desktop.

I am a musician and have been working on a recording which I save as I go as multiple versions ex. song 1.1, song 1.2, etc.  All of the versions that were created after the available system restore date are gone.  But it's weird because the bounces that I did (wav files not pro tools files) from the later versions are there, just not their pro tools session file counter parts.

I've restored all of the files/folders to Users/HomeAppData/Local/Temp however that didn't change anything.

The pro tools files that went missing are not hidden, I can't see them when I show hidden files.  I've tried doing a system restore undo but I get an error message saying it can't do it.

Please help, I've been working on this song for a very long time and don't want to loose all of the hard work I've done.

Thanks,
Jeremy

[Calum]

it's possible that your user profile could not be loaded properly.  Check in C:\Users for a folder similar to your username but with a TMP or 1 or .old extension.  For example, my user profile may be C:\Users\Calum but if it got corrupted, my profile may be C:\Users\Calum.TMP or C:\Users\TMP.  You may be logged on using either the old profile or the new one, so if there are two or more similarly named profiles, check them all.
It seems very unlikely that your programs could have simply gone, perhaps it's just the shortcuts which are missing?  Deleting a few registry keys should not have uninstalled your programs and deleted the whole user account, that's why I suspect it may just be a corrupted profile.  Have a look around under C:\Users and see what you find.

[deliciousmix]

Hi Calum,

Thank you for taking the time to respond.  I agree it seems like some kind of profile mishap.  I checked the users folder and there is a similar user (mine is called home, and there is one called home.home-PC), but there is no desktop folder inside and the missing files were in a folder on the desktop.  When I try to click on the pictures folder in Documents it sais "location is not available".   I did a deep scan with Recuva and no luck.  Any ideas?

[Calum]

Definitely does sound like a profile issue then.  Unfortunately if the folder is missing and Recuva can't find anything, I don't think you'll have too much luck outside of professional data recovery.  One other program you could try, which can be run from a bootable disk, is Photorec/Testdisk.  I've found it to be pretty much on par with Recuva for recovering accidentally deleted files, but it might be worth a shot.