win7 won't load my profile, but there's no error messag

My Dell Inspiron 1545 came out of hibernation without showing my normal desktop.

Instead I have what I assume is a default profile, with a windows 7 icon instead of my normal wallpaper and none of the files or programs I normally see. Restarting doesn't change anything - I log into my profile with my normal password but get the default desktop instead.

If I run a system search for one of the files that's on my normal desktop and then right-click "open file in location" I can see the contents of my whole desktop folder inside Computer/OS(C:)/Users/[my name]/Desktop. But when I click on [my name] in the startup menu, the Desktop folder is empty.

I can find the programs I've downloaded by running a search, and most of them will run (Google Chrome won't) but they open as if I've never used them before.

WTF? I can't tell if this is a setting that's somehow switched to default mode, a bug in my profile, or something else entirely. Most of the postings I've found concern similar-sounding problems but the posters got an error message or some other indication that something was wrong with their user profiles.

I'm a semi-Luddite so I'm having trouble figuring this out. Thanks for any advice anyone can offer.

So the latest system restore date (this is where you restore your system to a previous state, right?) is a few days ago. Since then I've written a bunch of documents and downloaded some files that I haven't backed up. Will those be lost?

ok, so - sorry - how do I do the repair install? I'm not seeing that one in my little menu of system repair options. I made a system repair disk awhile back... is that what I need?