TiVo Desktop Now Playing List Deleted

I upgraded from 2.3a to 2.5 and encountered the standard "Tivo Desktop time-out can't find dvr at 41 of 191 recordings" error. So after looking at the Preferences and setting everything according to my former system settings (only major change is that I route my files to H:\My TiVo Recordings on an external USB drive) and not being able to get past the time out. I saw the Restart or Reset tab.

The TiVo Properties were all maximized (config, performance, access control, etc) and I rebooted all devices several times (tivo iself, router, tivo desktop program and even the computer). So this route was examined and retryed.

So I went to the Restart or Reset tab and 'Just Restart'ed several times while going thru the rebooting situations above. Finally I selected 'Clear & reset everything' and tried this.

Well, after the restart the TiVo Desktop Now Playing list came up clear. Not good. I check H:\My TiVo Recordings using explorer and saw that all my .tivo files were gone!

So the situation is: I know what the names of the files were, where they were, but can't get access to them. Is this a file recovery situation (external via windows file recovery?) or is there a core data file that I can restore that will recover the locations of those files?

Any suggestions or recovery programs would be appreciated.

thanks,
Joseph