Finally recovered, from OS failure.
lost all my bookmarks, ftp links and all settings, BUT gladly everything eMule-related was preserved.
I'm so tired...
It all started from a very out of the blue incident some hours after installing winXP SP2 that a few programs would not run at all and their icons were turned to those windows default ones. I tried to run System Recovery but it also had been affected.
Well I located the System Recovery executable manually and ran it, but after completing the recovery and restarting the system, Windows would not load at all.
After formatting and getting everything back together with a fresh install of XP + SP2 update, I got hit by some odd virus that F-Secure Anti-Virus calls "Backdoor.Rbot.gen" which was a fucking pain to remove. If anyone finds an info page about this virus I'd be interested to look at it -- even F-Secure's own site has no info of it at all, and by googling I haven't found a description of it that would match the symptoms I had on my computer.
Now I still have to reinstall like 10 more programs...
glad the mule is ok tho
