stewart, it sounds like they used the recovery CD and blew your stuff away. The steps I gave would have left your stuff in tact applications and personal documents.
I really dislike that they ship PCs without the install media. I understand why they do it (theft) but still think it does a disservice to the user community. I think they should at least partition off the disk (C and D) so that the install CD will only wipe the C leaving the D with your personal stuff in tact. That is the way we do our images at EDS which prevents problems like Stew is having.
kevin...
