I wnat to recover users who have been lost from the registry but whose files
are all intact on the H/D.

After a recent crash, I had to recover from my original XP 2002 disk and
then run upgrades (I am now current with XP-SP2 Home).  Unfortunately, no
backups or restore points were available or worked.  As a result, most of the
registry was lost.  In particular, all the Users were unregistered (don't
appear on welcome screen), even though all their files are still intact under
Documents and Settings.  As a couple of these users have large amounts of
data, I would really like to restore them rather than recreate them and
transfer data.  Moreover I have run into at least one problem in trying to
transfer data (with Outlook, which I will cover in a different post to the
appropriate group).

If I create a new user with the same name as one that used to exist and has
user files,  e.g. "Tony", it picks up the original picture (oddly enough)
from the old account, but the first time I sign on to the "new" user Tony, it
creates a separate set of files with a suffix appended to the folder name.  

If it is possible without entering huge amounts of registry data manually to
recover these users, I would like to do so.  I do have some older registry
backups taken with Erunt, but when I restored one of those early in the
recovery process there were serious problems, so I suspect they may be
unusable safely.

As a related issue, I wonder if it is easily possible to change the
relationship between the User Name and the actual folder names.  My original
main user is called "Tony" but explorer shows the top user folder under
Documents and Settings as "Tony Patriarche", with "Tony Patriarche's Music"
etc. when viewed from another user.  I would like to change everything to
match the user name "Tony", as this will make it easier to synchronize with
my laptop.