Windows Vista - virus has hidden photo folders?

I have a computer in my shop with Windows Vista on it that has been virused. Odd thing, after removing the viruses, all PUPs, the computer runs again, but the photo files will only show up in Media Player. When a search was done to locate the folders, the search concluded that the photos were still in "Users/owner/photos" but when I went there, several files were missing, so I went back to the search page and copied all the files and created a new folder to put them in in "My Docs". When I pasted the files into the new folder, there was nothing showing, but when I went to paste them in again, I was told that the photos were already there.

I ran another search for another missing photo folder and the search results were the same. It gave the same location as before, and when I went there, the folder was not there. So I went back once again and copied the individual files from the "search" results, and went to paste them into the new "My Docs" folder.

Again, the pasting did not produce visible results, but when I went to repaste them into the folder again, I was promped that the folder already contained these filese. "Right clicking then selecting "Properties" resulted in being told once again that the folder was empty, yet it now contains 2 folders of photos. I am completely stumped!!!!!!!!!1

Anyone got any ideas here?

I would like to just "Killdisk" the drive, but the owner does now want to lose all these photos. He guesses that there are several gygs of photos that will only show in "Media Player", which I cannot verify since I cannot not even prove the existance of these photos anywhere except in Media Player.

I need some way to extract these photos, even though they "don't exist!"

(I also fear that these photos are carrying some virus that has not yet been detected.) The computer does not run right, and undoubtably the hard drive needs to be reformatted to reinstall windows entirely, but the owner wants to save these photos first.