I'm hoping that there has to be some fail safe way to recover
encrypted files in this case.

I use four physical hard disks on my machine, and have several
different backup strategies, BUT, I recently did a clean reinstall of
XP, and missed decrypting some files on one of my hard disks
beforehand.  I can view thumbnails
of these files curiously enough, but cannot otherwise open them.

I am wondering where XP keeps the file that decrypts these [on the
fly], so that
I might locate it in one of my previous data backups and then be able
to decrypt these files and thus retrieve them.

Is it possible?

Thanks