Uninstalled PD4.0, and now everything is lost ...

I upgraded to PD 4.0 a couple weeks ago. I made the HUGE mistake of not backing up PD 3.0, because I didn't have enough memory left on my iMac to do that. Somehow, my PD 4.0 installation got corrupted, and after a week of back and forth with tech support, they advised me to do a complete uninstall and reinstall of PD 4.0. I moved my entire My Documents folder from my Windows XP VM to my iMac's Desktop before uninstalling. The uninstall went fine, as did the reinstall. However, after I rebooted from the uninstall, everything on my iMac's Desktop was gone. The whole My Documents folder that I saved to the iMac Desktop is nowhere to be found. I had tons of important school files, pictures, and other important files in that folder. I was not given any reason to suspect that everything was going to disappear. Is there any way to find that folder now? I am devastated to think that it is gone. I don't understand why it disappeared. Please help me.

 

If you didn't start Virtual Machine meanwhile using system profile, it means that after restart Mac OS corrected file entries in file system, I met such situation before I worked in Parallels and the only solution was for me, to use Data Rescue from http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php,
In my case problem was, that Mac was not rebooted about 1 month

 

So the Data Rescue application is the only way to retrieve my files? Will it definitely retrieve all the files, or is there a chance that I could pay $100 for the program and then it won't work? Should I use the application for Mac, or for PC? Thank you for your help.

 

I am not able to provide you with 100% guarantee, In my case on Tiger I was able to retrieve data,
It is Mac software, as it was caused by Mac OS
Also there are other such programs, just I remember my case, before I joined Parallels

 

Okay ... thank you for your help.