undelete documents folder

I was deleting a power point in documents folder but I had the "documents" folder highlighted. Big mistake. I got the message "too big to fit in recycle bin" and thought must be a big power point, so I hit OK. When I saw all my sub folders dispearing I hit cancel. All that was left was one sub folder that had no files left in it. I didn't use my computer for anything after that point. My help desk made an image of my hard drive and ran several different utilities and only revered on additional folder and older previously deleted files. I ran DataRecovery 2.4.6 (full scan, took about 24 hours) and got the same results. Reading other posts I see major issues when the "documents" folder is deleted. (C:\users\user.name\documents). I also tried the "previous versions" looking for shadow copies with the result "no previous versions available". The DataRecovery scan shows all kinds of system? files wid, .dir, .log, .cvr, .wid, .cat, .mum ....... I looked up the extensions seeing if one was some sort of "index" file but nothing looked like that type of file. So my questions are:
- Is there some sort of file I need to recover first that contains indexing information?
- Did hitting "cancel" make this worse?
- Is there another recomended undelete utility I should run besides DataRecovery( preferably free)
- Why was one folder (of 6) left but empty and only one other recovered?
Thanks for the help

Vista enterprise ver6.0 build 6002 sp2

You can download and use shadow explorer to restore your documents
http://www.shadowexplorer.com/

I downloaded and tried shadowexplorer.exe. Nothing shows up, nothing on the pulldown menu for previous dates. Am I missing something?

If you have the dates it should show up.
Possibly you did not make the points, which should be automatic.
In lieu of that, although not as good, try recuva
http://www.piriform.com/recuva

I ran Recuva in deep scan mode. I found some of the recently deleted files (still not finding most of them). I tried to recover 33 of them writing them to a server drive as to not overwrite and hard drive sectors. All 33 failed with the message "The system cannot find the path specified". I verified I can save to the server so I don't think the message refers to that. Recuva shows the path with C:\?\ or C:\?\named sub folder\sub folder. The files I'm looking for were in C:\users\user.name\documents\named subfolder\sub folder.

When I hit "cancel" during the initial delete, did I mess up some index referencing the folder structure?

I think that if recuva and shadow cant help they are gone. Im sorry, but I gave you the names of the best software to resolve the problem