Hard drive optimization

My Win2000pro laptop crashed recently and when I rebooted, my administrator profile was lost and a new one was created. As a result, I lost all my user files stored in my documents and my pictures (lesson to all - do not store user files in those folders). I was able to recover most of my files using PC Inspector (recommended) but when I loaded my recovered files onto my PC, my disk drive filled up. My guess is all the files that existed before the crash are still on the harddrive and for some reason, the disk drive manager will not over write them because somehow the system thinks those files are still valid files, even though Win2000 will not let me see them. I called both Microsoft and IBM to try to recover the lost files and profile and neither one was able to help. They both said to try third party lost data recovery software - which I did and it worked, but now my disk space used by the old files for some reason does not seem to be available. I looked at a bunch of disk management tools on download.com but none of those seemed to say they would recover disk space from lost files. Any suggestions other than reformat the C: drive (which I do not want to do)?

Thanks

 

Here's a link with a Windows 2000 Disk Cleanup that may work: http://www.gregorybraun.com/CleanUp.html