Sorry to hear about the misery. I had something like that myself - I thought I had lost my profile with all my competition solutions in it.
But it turns out I had just mis-clicked the desktop icon, and started the wrong program. Phew. (I have two game installations, one for original play, and another for these challenges.)
It does sound like some sort of hard drive corruption went on though. To lose the background image as well... that's significant, I think. Really rotten luck.
This is a strangely awesome challenge. At first glance I feared the dillos were twice the normal size, and so heavy they'd break everything. But it was just optical illusion.
And I too feel like I found a strangely awesome solution quite early.
But I can't imagine any other way to do it, either.
Maybe some inspiration will come in the next four days, but I'm also looking forward to seeing everyone else's results.
2000+
PS: I'll point out again, that the first few AR2 challenges were not solved using the 2.1.3 version, but presumably 2.0.0. I only discovered that when the five year old solutions completely and utterly failed to solve.