Yes they were deleted, and unfortunutly, there is no way of recovering them. ZL gave me a link to PC Inspector File Recovery, and I spent the better part of the day trying to recover them, but w/ negligable success.
See, when I went to take the screen cap of my desktop for the Dektop Thread, I placed all my icons/folders/files in the recycling bin to clean it off. Unfortunutly, when I used the restore all button, not all was restored. I tried a system restore to get the files back, but it didn't work and only raised more questions. It keeped some of the files that had been created after the restore point, and it only recovered the folders and not their contents. I lost files I had created and accumulated, files that were hard to find and took weeks to get. After using the recovery tool ZL told me about, i discovered that 95% of the files were lost or corrupted.
Now I have to spend the next few weeks, dedicated to finding new copies of all those files...some of which I didn't remember the names
cries.