Hi,

I presume you have tried to do it as administrator?

First thing you might try is to take ownership. There is a Microsoft article here that tells you how:

http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;en-us;308421

You will need to go into safe mode, right click etc................

Why have I lost access?
I think that the HP recovery has caused this. It has allocated a new security ID (SID) to your user. Now, although you are using the same User ID and password, the new SID is different from the one that your files and folders were created under.

So you need to re-grant ownership to the user to transfer the new SID.

At least that is my guess, so please let us know how you get on

//Off topic but related:

This problem happens to people who have "upgraded" to Vista, but for a quite different reason. "Documents and Settings" is only a pointer for backwards compatibility, it is not a real folder. It is now called "Users" or something like that. That's where you will find the data