babaloo

If you reinstalled Vista, rather than choosing to see if Vista could repair
an existing installation, Vista deleted your My Documents folder.
This has been a consistent and rather cruel fact of Microsoft OS
installation life. Win9x and XP will do the same thing.
If this is what you did your data is toast. You can try to run data
retrieval software but most likely it has all been overwritten.
Now you know why it is necessary to backup your files periodically to CD,
DVD or a second hard drive.
The other problem is the Vista boot loader. Yet again, dubious programming
decisions by Microsoft make it essentially impossible to remove the thing
unless you totally reformat your hard drive.
Of course if you are so unwise as to reinstall Vista rather than a real OS,
like XP, you will reinstall the wonderful Vista boot loader.
However you can set Vista so you do not see that menu at boot time.
It would be in your best interest to do some reading on the subject.