This may sound like a daft question wiith a very obvious answer....

if you have deleted some work and emptied your recycle bin is there ANYWAY of getting it back?
I often hear people say that things are traceable on your hard drive and that you never really clear things away.... therefore perhaps the above is possible?

Thanks

You can use Undelete from here http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/ . Its free and it will try to recover as many files as possible. It will give you a status of each file, good, fair or bad. It will usually find hundreds of files.
Be aware that anything you download to the drive you need to recover files from will start to write over the top of some deleted data. If possible, save it to a slave drive or something.

Thanks Tassie Devil