I think Windows recovery console does more harm than good. Cynical about my 'old' windows cd, I redid fixmbr with a new xp cd, hoping that maybe there was an improved version which would save me. But alas, it didn't (or maybe it did...).

I've spent quite a bit of time looking at similar error messages on various forums but nothing seemed to work for me.

I was determined that all was not lost, so i stuck the ultimate boot cd in as a last ditch effort before I start again. TestDisk has been my program of choice for partition table editing (as it gave me more promising results!) so I had a mess about and noticed that there were now boot errors listed on the partition table under the Dell and Windows partitions, which I'm fairly certain weren't there before i did fixmbr! So I used TestDisk to fix these errors. It said that the extrapolated volume was the wrong size or something, sorry, I cant quite remember, it's late! Anyway, excited by this I tried to fire up windows. No joy. Some error about it not being bootable. Tried to mount the drive in Mepis and got the incorrect type errors, so I investigated in fstab, and sure enough the drive had been somehow reset to
vfat,ext3,ext2,reiserfs noauto,users,exec 0 0.
Change it to
ntfs noauto,users,exec,nls=utf8,umask=0222 0 0
and hey presto! I get my files back! I hope it wasn't just this that was wrong in the first place!!

Thanks for the advice everyone!

Backing up now...