Help: File Restore/Recovery

My wife saved all her Word (.doc) files to a USB drive directly from her Mac so that she could take them to work to backup without leaving a trace of the files on her Mac. At work she dragged them to the PC desktop, but inadvertently created shortcuts instead of copying. She then deleted the files on the USB drive. I asked if they were showing up in the recycle bin, and she said they weren't.

I am waiting at the moment for her to come home and will look at the USB drive. What recommendations do people have for file restore and recovery? Is it better to do this in OS X or Windows? Might the files be somewhere on her laptop even though she saved to USB (due to Word's autosave)?

I am using 10.4.11 and also have Windows XP running under VMWare.

 

This has been an educating morning. Many free trial downloads to get through. Conclusions so far: although Boomerang looks sophisticated in its file list and generates text files that have quite a bit of text intact, FileSalvage looks like it can recover the files better from the previews it provides (file names all given as file.doc is a bit tedious though) - will have to fork out $80 to know for sure though.

Update soon.