HELP! I changed my desktop photo and lost all photos and music!

I swear, all i did was put a pretty picture of lightening (that was in Apple's list of stock photos to choose from BTW!) on my desktop. It might as well have been real lightening because iPhoto doesn't have any of my pictures in it and iTunes doesn't have any of my music. When I open these folders, I can find the content there, but why did it disappear from the programs AND if I change my desktop back, will the pics/tunes come back?!?! I can live without the photos but the music and movies!!!! I have it all on my iPhone but now I am afraid to "sync" it to my computer.
Perhaps something easy like "import"?

Well, I ended up just dragging and dropping my music back into iTunes and it recopied them but all playlists are gone... oh well. As far as I can tell, all purchased music is there as well.
As far as the photos, I can see and open them in the pictures file (with the album titles and all) with Preview, but I tried to drag and drop those as well, but it was saying there was an error and it couldn't read them or something like that. I know, I should have written the error message down... rookie mistake. Just to test, I tried to upload a picture from the folder to a website, but when I went to browse for the picture it didn't recognize any of them.
I also repaired permissions (there were alot!) a couple of times until there were none. That didn't seem to work... I am so frustrated. They are all there on the hard drive but they wont go into iPhoto.
I think the worst part is... why did this happen and what to avoid so it won't happen again. I can't believe it is just because I changed the background on my desk top. After I did it, many of my regular sites like webmail didn't recognize me when I visited and I had to answer a bunch of my security questions again. Its as if they don't recognize this is the same computer just because it has a different screen saver!!! If all this really is because of that, it is a major design flaw. Why put the option to change if it is going to throw the whole system into a tailspin?
I am sure it is something I did wrong... just venting.
Anyway, how to get the photos imported back into iPhoto... any more ideas?

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