Well, the good news is, the bootable CD worked and I got back into my Admin account. The bad news is, before I got myself kicked out, while I was foolishly messing around with my user accounts (trying to get rid of the login screen), it appears that I accidentally deleted THE account that I'd be using for years, w/ all my data, docs, emails, photos, music, etc. I know this is a long shot but ... does anyone know anything about recovering deleted accounts? I know there probably isn't a way. Silly me. I'd like to thank everyone for their input. I learned a lot from y'all!

http://forums.getdata.com/showthrea...

Did you actually delete accounts, or just create a new one? A little more information would be good. The data may still be under the old profile name in Documents and Settings.... Another good reason not to store data within a profile.... Always good practice to redirect "My Documents" to another folder; ideally on another partition. Life's more painless for the brainless.

Hurrah! It looks like my info is still stored in my computer. Still had to put together another account but had all the data to go in it. In the process, learned about .pst files! Thanks, everybody.

Might help others if you state how you were able to recover the data. I assume by your comment you're using Outlook for email. Life's more painless for the brainless.

Good idea, Jennifer. I just assumed that this was common knowledge to most of y'all. My original problem was getting locked out of any account w/ Admin capabilities. Additionally, I had deleted the account (from User Accounts) that I use on a daily basis. I followed someone from another forum's suggestion and Googled "NTPASSWD" and re-set my admin password using a bootable CD (the top listing at Google shows you how to make it). After I got back in, I thought that all my data was gone, given that I had deleted the account. Turns out, as someone suggested, all the data was in my Documents and Settings: C:\Documents and Settings\%Account Name% (etc) After that, I found my .pst files (use your Start Menu's "Search" option and put in ".pst" or Google some suggestions of where to look). Originally, it wouldn't let me import the .pst files back into Outlook, so I copy and pasted them into another file (in this case, My Docs) and then imported them from there. My Calendar and Contacts came with them automatically. Thanks to all you computer superheroes who helped me.

Glad you were able to get your data back. I make it a habit to never Import pst files. If I want to use the "old" one on a new system, I just change the Data Files settings and make the old one the Mail Delivery file. FYI, default location for a pst file is C:\Documents and Settings\userid\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook. Again, not where I store mine... Life's more painless for the brainless.