I emptied this folder and my Recycle Bin and do not have a restore or back up set. I lost all the files that had been recently changed. Can I ever get them back?

The strange thing is when I search for text that was in these files the files do come up in searches but when I click on them it says they do not exist.

Search google for file recovery utilities. The reason for the text could be that they're present in whatever search indexing Vista does and it hasn't updated yet or something.