All Photos Deleted by Windows 7?

I use Windows 7. I am an advanced user.

I was using Windows Explorer to move photos from a folder into another folder under My Pictures. I grabed the files from the one folder then used the left-side folder tree to move them to the folder I wanted them to go to.

While Windows Explorer was still open, I then navigated back to My Pictures and deleted the now empty folder (this was a folder within My Pictures).

At that point, I was suddenly moved back from My Pictures to my user folder. I went back to My Pictures to check on the file move and I got a warning that "My Pictures is not accessible."

This was very odd. I waitied a second and tried again, no luck. I right-clicked for properties and it showed I suddenly didn't have any permissions to the folder. Very odd behavior.

I waited another second and tried opening the My Pictures folder again, this time it worked. However, to my horror - all subfolders and files were gone - gone!

I thought I might have mistakenly moved all the files/folders to a different folder when I moved them by using the left-side folder tree. However, a complete search of my entire computer showed the files were truely gone.

My recycle bin is set to delete immediately. Remember I did NOT select anything othar than 1 specific folder (highlighted) and not the entire My Pictures folder nor contents.

I tried to use a recovery utility to get them back, and while I installed it to another drive and it did find many files, it was unable to recover any except 2 or 3 photos.

I just lost 7 years of photos because Windows 7 has some very bad programming error in it.