I am having major problems restoring from Time Machine. The computer tells me I have completely restored but no data is available in the various applications.

I had backed up all my data to Time Machine, then securely deleted all data on my MacBook Pro and reinstalled Snow Leopard, prior to having Apple replace a faulty Airport card. I went through the normal restoration process from Time Machine, which took quite some time (about 2.5 hours for 240 Gb of data, including applications) without giving any indication of a problem. However, although the computer indicates that 240 Gb has been reinstalled on the hard drive, data such as photos, music, documents, IOS apps, movies, etc , is not showing up in the relevent application i.e. photos in iPhoto or mobile apps in iTunes. Even though application icons were visible in the dock, they would not open. I spent two days (one hour one day and five hours the next) at the Apple Genius Bar trying to find out what the problem was, without any success. No matter what was tried, no clear solution was evident so I was given a manual workaround to bring back banks of files one at a time, which has given me some workability. All data is obviously stored on the external hard drive, but restoration has not been successful. I have successfully used Time Machine to restore all data from a previous MacBook to my current MacBook Pro without any hitches whatsoever. The only difference this time is that I have two separate accounts on the Pro, which may be causing the problem. I can restore items manually from either account but they all go into one account. Also, when manually restoring photos or music from Time Machine, I am unable to select the relevent location for this data, i.e. iPhoto or iTunes. The only way I got these into the relevent application was by putting them into a burn folder or onto a thumb drive and then dragging them into the dock application. I am not very computer savvy and feel totally out of my depth to manually restore everything back to where it was before the clean install, particularly the two user accounts, which I would loke to have back again. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Rob.