If I mistakenly closed a file without saving my last section of work, is there anyway to recover it or do I just have to redo everything?
Doesn’t it prompt you to save the changes?
Yea, but I was talking to my exec and hit no instead of yes because I thought it was another file. I’m probably screwed, but am grasping at straws here. 
Can’t even recover from auto save, the place it’s set to save doesn’t even exist. Gotta love whoever in IT set that up.
IIRC you’re on XP. Bring up a command prompt and type in cd %temp% then press enter. Then type dir /p and press enter. Keep paging through the listing. You may see your file.
The other default autosave location is the original directory. Try looking there for files starting with a ~ sign.
A third option is to check in Windows Explorer and see if you have ‘Previous versions’ available.
Failing that, you could always ask the IT guys to restore it from the previous night’s backup.
Along the same lines, what if I have a big hunk of stuff I copy (say I’m posting to the SDMB and copy as a backup), then accidentally copy something else (say an email address). Any way to get the previous clipboard entry back?
Depends on the program. Office has a clipboard archive which holds the last 24 entries. See Edit >> Office Clipboard … .
Windows in general does not.