I've talked earlier to Eskimo via private messages because there was a restriction for me as a new user to reply here, but now I am able to publish it here, which I think would be appropriate:
One of the screenshots shows 18/08/2014 18:53 as "Date modified" and you said that it has stopped working as of the 19th. Do you happen to remember when was the last time it was working (perhaps until, or after 18:53 on the 18th)?
You said that you tried to use system restore unsuccessfully. Could you be more detailed? Did you have a restore point from a date and time when you are certain that this Electrum wallet worked? Did you attempt restoring and did the restore process finish with no errors? Did you then try to open the wallet file in Notepad to see its contents, or did you give up after only trying to start Electrum? I think that if you still have a restore point from a date and time when the wallet was undamaged (old restore points get deleted automatically!) the undamaged wallet file should be there. It might well turn out that you have multiple older versions of it from dates before the 18th sitting on your disk.
Finally, there is file recovery software that can be used to look for and recover older versions of the file in its normal location or deleted copies of it (e.g. from restore points that have been automatically deleted). It should also be possible to search the entire disk at a lower level for a specific string of characters, e.g.:
'seed': '
which is what should precede the seed in an Electrum wallet file. This would have an even higher chance of success. Be aware that the more data gets written to the disk (which happens during normal use) the greater the chance that data from deleted files gets overwritten and thus the lower the chance of successful recovery. If you want to maximize the chance of successful recovery you might want to make an image of the whole disk or partition now for later use for data recovery purposes.
Eskimo told me in response (in part):
when I used the restore to an older date on the control panel in windows it asked me when I wanted to restore and I clicked on a week earlier (one of the options it gave me) and I believe at that point the wallet hadn't been working.
I don't really remember exactly when it stopped working but the 18th sounds right. It worked in the morning and in the afternoon it wouldn't open.
and also asked about data recovery.
To that I replied with the advice that the chance of success can be maximized with the help of someone with good experience and tools for data recovery who would need to have access to the physical disk or computer to do their thing. I also proposed a plan that is somewhat less ideal but perhaps simple enough to try on one's own for searching for and recovering a deleted file or a string pattern. I mentioned the fact that files in restore points are stored with compression (on NTFS partitions) which complicates searching for string patterns.
I also mentioned the Previous Versions feature in Windows 7 (
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/85679-previous-versions-restore-files-folders.html) which relies on restore points, but should in theory be better suited to finding out definitively whether there is an older version of a file in an existing (not deleted) restore point or not, compared to reverting the whole system using System Restore.
I did not receive a reply to this message so I was wondering what has happened regarding the wallet.
Now more questions come to mind that I didn't think to ask earlier, but which might just lead to a breakthrough. When you first created the wallet in Electrum, in the first step it shows you the seed in the form of 12 words. It asks you to write them down somewhere and you have to have done that or copied them or memorized them, because in the very next step it asks you to enter them again, just to verify that you've completed the previous step. How did you complete these steps and is there any chance that you have those 12 words written or stored somewhere?
