[Chris27]

When your cat unplugged your computer, the hard drive was likely reading/writing something important. Hard drives don't like suddenly loosing power and any file that it was writing may be corrupted, in your case an important Windows file. When you restored your computer using the hp restore disks, it copied your "Documents and Settings" folder to someplace safe, wiped your hard drive, and then installed windows and the other software your computer originally came with. Everything that was not in your "Documents and Settings" folder is now gone. This explains why your desktop (a subfolder) is still intact, including the shortcuts to your apps, but those applications no longer exist as the "Programs" folder was deleted. You really can't recover a deleted application and you likely already wrote on top of the data already. You are going to have to reinstall everything. The CD keys should be on a sticker on the back of the cd case (why do you have to go dumpster diving? did you throw away the cd cases?). In the future backup you computer every now and then. There is plenty of software available that can copy an image of your harddrive to a few DVD's which you can restore back to when necessary.