Technical Issues

So, this is a quick description of what I went through yesterday because I made a, let's be honest, really stupid mistake.
Around 2 PM yesterday the game crashed. This happens, it's a Bethesda game. But when I tried starting it from Steam again, it wouldn't start. My first thought was to restart Steam and see if that fixed it. And when I did... Steam wouldn't start. My first idea: uninstall Steam.
Yeah. That's where it started.
The idea that Steam would remove ALL my games with itself did come to me, but I assumed that it would at least warn me if it did that. It didn't. Everything with New Vegas except the saves got deleted. Which includes the mods.
If the mods hadn't been deleted, this wouldn't have been a problem. I'd just reinstall the game, problem solved. But figuring out exactly what mods I used is nigh impossible if you look for them the regular way. So I downloaded an undeleter program to, in a feeble attempt, get the game back. It didn't work. But I did manage to get a list of the mods I used back, so I actually COULD reinstall them. So in the end, I managed to solve it. Things work as they should now.
But this took eight hours of my day yesterday... Not too happy about that. But hey, that's how things go.