10.4 Desktop folders missing

[y2j58]

On my friends Macbook, she had a bunch of desktop folders with Word Documents in them. She said that she updated her mac and then all of her folders and files were no longer there. She tried searching for the files in finder but only found really old back up files.

I searched around and some say the files are missing because of a quickbooks update, but she doesn't have quickbooks. Could the Mac update caused her files to go missing? Is there another way to retrieve her files? Thanks.

[Giaguara]

Did she rename her home folder by any chance? http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=106824