I need help from my fellow TR community. I restored my c:/ drive using the recovery disk , because I was having problems with persistent spyware on my computer. However I can’t now access ‘My documents’ on the d:/ drive. I think it may be because I had encrypted ‘My documents’ using the built-in XP encryption. Please help me as I’m stuck for a solution

This is not going to be the answer that you want but unless you have access to the original encryption keys then you have just lost all of your data.

AFAIK there is no way to reverse engineer the keys - in theory you *could* try to brute force it if you can find an application to do this but the time it would take is going to be potentially very long. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but….
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;308993

For the details - in effect you have deleted the original user account that had the keys, thus the certificate has now disappeared. Even if you recreate a user with the same name the SID (M$ Security ID) of the user will be different and this will have an effect on the certificate process.

If you really want to encrypt the fiel system again then follow the best practices as defined here http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;223316

or just use a boot password for disk access and rely on WinXP logon with a STRONG password to protect the files from casual access.