All my .chproj is gone so are my puppets

I don't think the "Recent Projects" menu item history is retained when you upgrade CH, so everything should be right where you left it. 

In your Documents folder, you should have an Adobe folder. Then inside that is a Character Animator folder. That's the default location for your CH projects. You can of course put your projects wherever you like, but by default, this is where they go. 

You should be able to do a File>Open>Documents>Adobe>Character Animator>"Your Project"

Are you using a cloud-based file utility like DropBox to sync your Character Animator Project folder?  When Dropbox has conflicts while syncing folders it can sometimes resolve them by deleting files.

I am also wondering if your files are in fact still there, but are in a different directory than you expect.   How did you search earlier?  I suggest using the Windows Command Prompt and trying the following command:

c:\Users\bromm> dir *.chproj /s/q

It is possible that when you installed the new version of Character Animator your default project folder got reset.  That wouldn't delete any files, but perhaps the new default directory is empty.

Recommend strongly that you backup your files before upgrading, these things happens but Adobe understood my case and while the files are gone with the wind I can at least stop looking for them and start rebuilding 🙂 (and yes I use cloud based storage - but just not in this case)