Pls help, i lost all my imporant files

Hello, im mae. just today while working on my laptop(windows xp) there were boxes that was popping up randomly once in a while(msg was"the system file found not specified", sort of virus. so what i did first was i created a new user account with a new password but it didn't work so i tried to do a system restore but for some reason system restore is not working. so i reset the system restore, and the rest is history, i've lost all my important files, it was like hell. Please tell me how can i restore all my files. i hope you can help me soon. thank you very much!