Recovering Missing Files From The Hard Drive?

I am using windows 7 ultimate.Today I booted the computer and it went to a message that said preparing desktop. After windows loaded the normal software was present, but my customized links were gone and the default background was present. My files that were in my normal user folders were not present, but were later located in the users/username folder. I moved some of these folders to the desktop as that is where they had previously done. In the users folder there were 3 folders (public, my username and whatever the new default user was called). When I restarted the computer everything came back to normal, except the folders of files I had placed on the new desktop. I went into the user folder, but it only had my current user and the public folders.How do I recover the files from the desktop from the random corrupted profile that windows created which I can not manually log into? I searched for the files and the last record of them is linked to my user and says the shortcut is not valid.