What you have done is restored your computer to "restore point" which is a snapshot of your system at an earlier time. The restore point could have been set one day ago, one week ago, one month ago, etc.

The nice thing about system restore is you can recover from a serious operating system problem without having to blow out the hard drive (i.e. lose everything), reinstall the OS, tweak your system, reinstall other software, etc.

The bad news is you lose everything that you have done with the computer between restoring your system and when the restore point was set in the past. That would mean any new software you have installed is gone, any documents created using Word, Excel, or any program are gone, e-mails and contacts are gone, and yada yada yada.

What you might consider doing in the future is back up any pictures or documents, or e-mails and address book contacts you want to save onto a CD or flash drive.

As for e-mail, you might see if your ISP offers web mail (similar to hotmail, gmail, yahoo mail, etc.). That way you access your e-mail via an web browser and the e-mail messages are store on the providers server and are not affected by problems on your machine. Another nice thing about web mail is it eliminates a lot of your exposure to viruses since the ISPs server will typically scan any attachments you try to download and will not let you do it if there is a problem.

Cheers!
Bill