Home folder empty, can't login, complicated one--asking for experts

Question

My home folder is empty and when I log in to my username I just get the blue pattern screen and it never progresses.
I posted this to the PB forum also because I'm not sure what caused this... It's complicated.
OK, for starters... Latest OSX, 1.25gh with 2 gigs Crucial ram. Filevault turned on. Lately there has been a little bit of strangeness from the laptop... more spinning wheels than normal, more delays. SMART status always said verified. Yesterday ran hardware check off the laptop install disk and everything checked out.
I occasionally use a G-Raid Firewire 400/800 CardBus adapter that often freezes up the laptop and causes a forced restart. I think I had it in at the time that i was doing a backup to an external drive with SuperDuper. It did cause a freeze a little bit earlier. On first backup try I got an error due to having too much data on my drive to be cloned by SuperDuper, so I trashed several gigs of photos I didn't need on my PB HD anymore (the photos had been in the HD area, not my encrypted home folder). It should have freed up enough space to successfully clone but I still got the SuperDuper error that said in the log that there wasn't enough free space. So I figured I'd restart. Ever since then, I haven't been able to get past the login on either my main drive or the clone. Ran DiskWarrior, repaired permissions, and repair disk off disk utility to no avail. However, I can log in to two other usernames (my wife's an a guest username). My user folder appears to be empty.
Luckily, I have a third clone on a pocket HD for such an occasion on the road, but it's a bit dated so I'd rather get my current user folder back if possible.
Help??? Anyone???

Answer 1

Before doing anything below, I reccomend you try this. In your wife's account, open up your old users folder. Choose File>Get Info. Where it says size, if the size is over a couple hundred megabytes, then all of your data is still there. If it just says a couple of KB, post here. I think your data is gone. Continue if it says something over a couple hundred MB or any amount of GB.
I noticed David Yonder's reply in the PB forum. What he was saying actually makes a lot of sense. Here is what I reccomend. Log into your wife's account. Open up system preferences. Go to Accounts, "Click the lock to make changes," select your account, not your wife's, and click "-" (delete) at the bottom. Click okay at the prompt. Create a new Administrator account with the same name as your old one. Then, open up /Users/Deleted Users/yourusername.sparseimage You should have all of your old files back. Create a new adiministrator account for yourself. Make a new folder on the root level of your hard drive. Name it "Backup." Copy all of the recovered files into that folder and login to your new account. Open up the backup file as well as your new users folder and drag all of the recovered files into their respective folders. That should do it. If it doesn't work, post again. Happy fixing!
Jake
iMac G5   Mac OS X (10.4.3)