while trying to rest limewire to play through windows media player I hit restore defaults...thinking it would set the player back. Instead ALL my files have disappeared...are they really gone or just hiding someplace????

Go to LW's menu bar, Tools > Options > Saving, and that will show where your downloads are now being saved. If you wish to change it back to how it was, (probably best to search your computer using the system search function to find the shared folder or files within) press the Browse button to direct it to which folder you wish to select to save your downloads into.