TigerShark-it was HP PC Recovery, which HP coached me through. As I said, nothing else seems to have survived but obviously these files did somehow. I may chat with HP again when I have time - they know me by name now -ha, ha.
I have looked for programs that will translate the data to human readable, the one I opened these files with is Notepad, and I've tried TedNotepad (doesn't work) and all the programs on my computer, Adobe, Microsoft Word, etc. Does anyone have a suggestion?