Plugin update deleted my work

I was working on a widget, and since I am just learning how to make widgets and use PHP in general, I based my widget on the example widgets. (google search, etc…)
I use my computer for web development, so I have wordpress running on my computer. I upload things to my website once they work on my computer.
Today, I logged in to my local wordpress’s admin page and noticed that some plugins had updates. Without thinking, I told wordpress to update them. The only copy of my widget was inside the “plugins/widgets” directory. None of the original contents of the widgets directory were there when I updated, but afterwards, I found that the entire contents had been replaced with the original files. Thus, my only copy of quite a lot of code is completely gone.

None of the now absent files appeared in the recycling bin.
I am about to try every file recovery program in existence, but while I do, I’d like to know if anyone knows a way I can recover my work.

I am running windows xp and am using the latest xampp to run wordpress.
The files were located at “c:\\xampp\htdocs\wordpress\wp-content\plugins\widgets” and a subdirectory of the same folder called “media-player” if that is of any help.