My clips all merged, and it won't let me ungroup..Help

Question

After about 70 hours of work putting together a video compilation and only being half done, I was adding and removing audio tracks, and when I went back to slideview, all my clips somehow "merged" into what now looks like one really long clip.  It's got the little "double-window" icon in the upper right which wasn't there before, and try as I might, I cannot figure out how to ungroup/break it back up!!  It still lets me skip from clip to clip in the monitor view, but I can no longer see the separate elements in the slide view, and eveything seems to be grayed out when I right click on the clip in slide view and try and ungroup or break it up.  (it doesnt have the little ungroup arrows either). Timeline view looks pretty normal.
I used up all my undos removing the audio tracks I was editing at the time, and I really don't want to start this all over again, is there a way to restore it back to the individual clips in the slide view?
Thanks,
Thor

Answer 1

Im not in front of it right now to check things out, but I will check the auto saves tonight when I get home.  Your reccomendation seems to suggest Autosaves are stored seperately from the manual saves?   That "may" be okay, but Im pretty sure I changed the value down to 10 minutes, and I think I wasted more than an hour trying to get it back, so even my oldest autosave is likely snafu'd.
The video sources are all mpg and vobs from burned DVD's, stored on the hard drive, and opened via the organizer, then I would drop a chapter onto a blank slide and then parse it into the clips I wanted to use for the compilation, deleting the others. That's worked great so far.
I first noticed the merge after I added a mp3 to the soundtrack, then I wanted a 2nd mp3 for a few minutes, then back to the first mp3.  I added a new Audio Track, added the 2nd mp3, then went and added another copy of the 1st mp3 onto Soundtrack, and did some fading in/out and trimming.
Went out of timeline and back into slides, and thats when I noticed all my video clips were now merged/stacked onto one slide, with no indication that it was groupd somehow.  (I know what grouped it items should like like, I had some clips grouped already within the project). Went back and removed the mp3's from the soundtrack and new Audio Track, but no dice.  (and though that new Audio Track is now empty, it doesnt get removed when I select "Remove empty tracks" for some reason)
The timeline view looks normal apart from the extra audio track, 4 video tracks currently to handle some split screen segments, and there's no soundtrack,or narration.
I can use the "next/last edit point" buttons in the monitor controls to jump to the individual clips..and I guess  I "could" reorder/insert/delete clips from the timeline view, but it would be quite a pain!