HELP! Lost my presets!!!

Hi
Let me be the first to admit that I'm an idiot, so let's not dwell on that...

I have been using home studio for a long time, and recently upgraded to SHS6. Life was good. Last week I bought a fast new PC, and installed again from scratch. In addition to making two copies of all my bundled projects, I had a backup of my C drive (via XP's backup utility) as well as having simply copied most of the program/system files to an external hard drive. Armed with these backups, and preliminary testing on the newly installed system, I reformatted my old hard drive (my wife gets my hand-me-downs...). Afterwards I discovered that my presets for all my effects (both Cakewalk and other) had disappeared. I had never even heard of the preset manager, and didn't imagine that user data such as presets might be stored in the registry. Yikes!

I reinstalled XP on my old computer and did a restore from my backup (never tried that before). Although it said it was successful, many things are screwed up - video drivers/settings etc are missing, etc. When I try to start SHS on the restored system, I first had to create a new audio swap folder - so far so good. Then it said " Unknown error in sequencer ddll" and quit.

It is a HUGE deal if I can't recover my presets - all of the songs are mastered down using them. Any suggestions, short of suicide, giving up music, etc?

Thanks in advance.

OK, maybe I'm not as screwed as I thought I was. Please let me know if the following is correct:

Let's say I have the perfect reverb settings all figured out, so I save them with the name "perfect". This information all gets stored in the registry. Now when I create a new CW project, and put reverb on a track, and click the "perfect" preset I created, then save the project, it saves the name of the prefect with the project. BUT...it also saves the actual values with the project as well. In other words, when I re-open the project, it doesn't just look at the name of the preset and read in the settings from the registry (I hope). So if the preset gets deleted (or in my case, doesn't make the trip from the old PC to the new one), the old project will still sound the same, because it will still have the same settings on the reverb. The only problem is that I can no longer add the "perfect" reverb preset to any new projects. Correct so far? Or not?

If the above is correct, then all I need to do is open the project that uses the "perfect" preset, open the reverb effect, and save it as "perfect". Now I've recovered the preset, right?

At least, I sure hope that's how it works.

Yes, that should work.