Disappearing "My Documents" Folder And Dud System Restore

I have a 3Ghz AMD with 1Gb RAM, 160Gb HDD, Win XP SP2 installed. The HDD is divided into 3 partitions - OS, Documents and Program. She has a network with her children's computers (4!) but whilst they can ping each other, they are not actually networked to each other.

I installed Nero 6. Burning and Cyberlink DVD on to her computer. Both were installed on the Program partition. At that point, all her documents and images were in the "My Documents" folder on the Documents partition and were all visible and working. Within the My Documents folder was a folder called "My Documents 1" which was all the stuff she had brought over from her old HDD but not yet sorted and merged with her current computer.

"My Documents folder" in the Documents partition had vanished,along with all her word, music and photo files.Webshot photos folder had also vanished. A search through Windows did not turn any of these up. I scanned the whole computer and found no trace of them. All the System Restore checkpoints for the last 5 days failed to restore the system to what it was prior to the installations. System Restore Incomplete - unable to finish or something to that effect. When I ran both the antivirus and spyware programs, the AVG run was clean but the spyware turned up 64 tracking cookies but no high level issues. (She felt running these programs daily chewed up too much time etc etc. Even when I told her to run all 5 computers at least once weekly (Boot up, start the scanning programs, get the updates and run them then leave them to do their scanning, walk away go do some shopping and check the results when you get back - too easy of course she did not do any backups which steps to take? Programs to use to try and recover her folders?