Windows 7: Open Office docs missing after sys restore

Hi,

I was trying to do a complete reinstall of Thunderbird and was trying to locate and delete folders which do not get removed after uninstall of Thunderbird.

Anyway, I clicked something in C: Users... and everything on the desktop disappeared.

So, I did a system restore to earlier in the day. Everything reappeared except some word and excel docs (Open Office versions).

I searched for these docs in the Windows explorer but found nothing.

So, I reopened the progs and was able to access the documents via recent documents. So I resaved them - but it said the files were already on the desktop (not that I could see) - anyway, I just renamed them and they are now there.

Anyway, any ideas why this might have occurred as I'd like to avoid this problem in the future.

Some of the files in my downloads folder have also disappeared.