HELP ASAP some lost files

Meh.

Have you booted from another drive and looked?

I think there are programs for recovering lost files. But if they were somehow deleted then the more you save on the drive, the more likely they are to be written over. There is some kind of trick to use in Terminal too, that allows Finder to show invisible or hidden files. You could probably google it. Good luck, I'd probably freak too...

Thank goodness for services like Mozy or Dropbox, CD and DVD burners and recordable and rewritable CD's and DVD's!!

More on the terminal: if a file is still there but invisible it will find it. I went looking for the Lord of the Rings timeline - it was in with Panther but the commands in Leopard didn't show it. After much poking I found open /usr/share popped open the finder window to those invisible files. Some unix things got changed in Leopard so the old command no longer worked. But the files were still there. So it's well worth a look in case the new system just rearranged things. Guaranteed you'll find some strange stuff in there even if it's not what your looking for. Just be careful not to delete anything! Could be a joke file or an important system file-one never knows in there.

TextWrangler will show invisible files. Just don't screw with something you didn't create.