A few weeks back, we had a question from a reader who had wiped out his Windows XP installation while some of his personal data files were encrypted by the operating system. At the time, I told him that there was really no way to recover the data. Since then, another reader pointed us to this program, which may be able to help in some cases. From the looks of it, it will not save you if you have fully formatted your Windows installation, but it may be able to help if you have merely deleted the user account that had access to the encrypted files.

If anyone else out there has run into this issue, or a solution to it, let us know .