Well at the risk of becoming an expert on crashing my Vista instal, a lot of searching resulted in nothing I can do - data gone bye bye !
I did learn some valuable lessons about JUNCTIONS (aka shortcuts) and how to access a Vista install which is normally invisible to XP.
The latter was achieved by using something like Paragon Partition Explorer and then MOUNTING the drive which then made it available for browsing from a command prompt using FileCommander (which reminds me very much of the old dos Norton Commander). Anyway by doing that I can get to and move around the Vista partition butr as I said ALAS all data gone that I wanted.
Now the important thing. READ THIS ARTICLE BEFORE EVER EVER EVER (did I say it enough times) EVER USING DISK CLEANUP particularly if Vista says disk space is low .
http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/se...-registration/
From what I can gather IF your registry is slightly screwy with regards to folder locations of temporary files etc it goes off on it's merry way and deletes whatever it thinks is approrpriate. In my case this included several driver files from System32/drivers as well ad My Documents, countless photos and spreadsheets.
And reading reports it appears this may also happen in some instances in XP however I have never had that (cross fingers).
Anyway I have now resorted to a year old copy of my outlook data (in XP) and will need to recreate some Tax files and spreadsheets. Ho Hum after alll these years (I started in the green screen dual floppy days of computing) things ain't necessarily got any better
Hope this helps those that may encounter similar problems