Shift-del isn't a problem compared to going via the recycle bin.

You definitely don't want to write to the drive any more so you're looking good there.

First I'd get a linux boot disk like Knoppix and make a byte for byte backup of the empty drive using dd. You may need to purchase some more storage to do this but given the situation I don't think that will be a big issue for you. Storage is cheap these days.

dd if=/dev/sdx of=<output file> where x is the is drive letter of the empty drive. You can find this via dmesg. I'm not sure of your linux skills but we can easily help you there.

I've had good success with R-Studio NTFS at recovering files. It isn't free though. You can run it and it won't write to the drive. You just need to recover to another partition of course.