"Saved" parts in assembly vanished? Trail files!

Hello everyone!

I am working on Creo Parametric 3.0 Student Edition without Windchill (student here). I have one main assembly file with some sub-assemblies in it. I was working on one of the sub-assembly's parts and constantly saving it between creation of parts. The gist of it is that my laptop fans turned all the way up, and I felt that the laptop was about to hang (has happened before) so I saved the assembly (It saved), did a "Erase not displayed", and exited the program. On restart, it said that one of my fasteners (from the Intelligent Fastener Extension) was unable to be found and I clicked "Ignore". The model that opened was an incomplete one that was missing many parts. All parts, assemblies, sub-assemblies are saved in the same local directory. I had imported some STEP files too, which were there, some of the others from later were missing. Something I noticed was that my working directory was now set to my "temp" folder, where I found tiny Trail files. I find these hard to read and I cannot get them to play as the option is grayed. Other information that may help:

• The largest trail file I have is in my local folder from the approx crash time. Size: 14.6 MB
• Local folder has some of the missing parts but not all of them. Where did they get saved? I also have too many version files.
• My config.pro file says "changed and specified *" for "save_objects"
• The "first" missing part shows up with its copy geometry but no extrude feature (with pattern) and from there on all parts I made are missing

So, what happened exactly? And is there any way I can recover the parts using the trail file or another method? 

I would have a few regeneration errors from some parts I suppressed (mean to deleted those later), though my model loaded fine with these. Any input is appreciated. Thank you very much!