Okay so a new episode in the dead computer thing. So after spending many many hours downloading the required updates to windows xp and office xp I decide to pull up some of the files I had saved on my desktop. Well lo and behold the dirrectory is encrypted, the only one that is, I guess at some point in time I had decided to try it out and see how the windows 2000 encryption worked, well I forgot this when I reformated my primary hard drive so bye bye encryption keys. On the other hand I have a huge number of the files still on my laptop in their non-encrypted form. Due to my lack of encryption knowledge I have no idea if what I'm thinking is possible to do, but I would think by comparing the encrypted and de-encrypted files one could regenerate the encryption key and then be able to decrypt the rest. Oh well I guess I'll just have do some more research on that, and make sure I don't hose another backup.

Moral of the story: if you decide to back up your files, don't encrypt the backup.