Snow Leopard to Lion - SAVE ME!

[The Question]

I Decided to upgrade to Lion because I found myself literally in the middle of where I wanted to be. Certain programs I spent A LOT of money on I could no longer use with Snow Leopard and some new things I wanted to download required Lion.

That combined with my father buying it for himself and I could just install his.

What I didn't realize was what I was getting myself into; I just wanted to be able to use the iPhone app maker for fun. So I started the download/install while I went out to dinner.

I've returned home to find myself going insane.

I get the weird scrolling stuff, it does make sense to at least Try to get used to it, and it is the way iPhone scrolling works.

But the appearance of the finder window has thrown me, I used specialized icons for everything, now it's all industrial gray while the chronology and alphabetical order is flipped, and certain folders/files that I have spent the last 6 months accessing by just opening a finder window and typing in the first few letters of it's name.
NO LONGER Appear, and the search window acts differently (at first glance it seems as if it should work Better, not worse).


Basically I know that I can make it All work the way I want if I put the time in to find helpful guides and sort through the system prefs and all the prefs of my important apps.

But I need my computer to function the way I need it to. Right Now! I have to Work! If there were some way to put this whole Lion upgrade on pause and just go back to the way things were, I would. And I think I can with a Time Machine backup, but that would require a complete wipe and then putting the old image back wouldn't it?

I mean the time it would take to do that, I might as well just Grab The Rail and Ride It Out.
Ahh crap, I just realized there could also be tons of applications I use that I didn't back up (I'm a Huge manual backup guy out of habit). And Time Machine has no backups from before Lion apparently (but I have a Time Capsule, never had reason to use till now).


So if anyone finds what I'm talking about familiar then Please, Please Advise Me or Point Me in the Right Direction with a Link.

 

[pipefitter]

Like you, I did an install of Lion to my MacBook Pro, and went to dinner. When I returned to my desk, the seamless installation was complete, but my files were all messed up. Even worse, Finder wouldn't work at all--I could SEE Finder, but if tried to click on it, it vanished. The files I was working on showed up in Word for Mac folders, but their roots were changed by Lion and they were grayed and inaccessible. Work came to an end. All I was trying to do was get my iCloud working optimally.

Ultimately I took my Mac back to Apple and had to leave it overnight. They wiped my hard drive, reinstalled Lion and then I used my Time Machine to restore all of my files. If you have to do what I did, make sure you have a good Time Machine backup before you set out for the Apple store. Also, I learned that Apple will not reinstall your backed up data for you, at least not for free.

In the end, all of my files are intact, and the new OS X 10.7.3 is awesome. I adjusted my finder so that it functions pretty much as it did before, but better. I readjusted my scrolling and track pad features to compromise between before and after Lion. I love Mission Control and Launchpad and the new built-in mail program is much improved, and is one with gmail which suits me fine. All in all I'm happy. Good luck.