rick-tech

Please excuse the delay in my response, I had a planned trip for the last several days that I couldn't put off.
TeraByte is correct, stupid $#%$ CodeGuard ceased running backups back in early Sept.  So the most recent backup I had was from then.
HOWEVER!  Something totally unexpected has happened, just after posting the message above I DELETED that weird Uploads folder with all the ghost files and created a new empty Uploads directory and within 24 hours the software had re-constituted almost ALL of the contents!!  The unique PHP files are now there as well as from what I can tell all of the subfolders WITH all my customizations!  The site is working just like before with just a few broken links to images.  The only errors that appear now are the occasional "does not exist" errors when one of said images is called.  From what I can tell right now the only things that are missing are the old gallery and image attachments to posts and a handful of button images!
Now all I have to do is re-upload all of the old gallery images and post attachments and anything else from the last backup that hasn't been recovered.  
I thought this whole time I was on vacation that I would be coming back to a full Email box of complaints and several days of recovery, but this, this is awesome!  I must say IPB is MUCH, MUCH more resilient then I ever expected (it's also very idiot prof thank God!!).
Thanks to all who posted suggestions on how to fix this! And a HUGE THANK YOU to the developers who created such a strong suite!
Rick