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I feel that there are other issues with bitcoinlaundry. I think I still cannot send private messages (newb status), but if the operator of that site wants to contact me directly, I would like to discuss them.

Edit: Looks like the author of bitcoinlaundry.com, mikegogulski, is now running a separate laundry at http://app.bitlaundry.com/ (which avoids the obvious correlation flaw I had on my mind). There is an e-mail address there that you may be able to use if you can't PM him.

There is/was a wallet.dat with your private key somewhere. If you didn't make copies, you need to find the original. If the original is gone, the BTC are gone (well, they are still there, but they can never be accessed again because the key to do so is lost).

Have you considered searching your entire hard drive for wallet.dat in case the installations use different paths for some reason? (Different user accounts perhaps?)

This means that there are two people knowing your key: You, and the online wallet service. Unless you trust it 100% (which would be dumb): Create a new key known only to you on a secure machine and transfer the BTC to that key (address).

Or until someone finds a weakness in one of the cryptographic primitives (or builds a working quantum computer).

There are two main cryptographic primitives used for bitcoin. Hashing (on which mining is based) and signatures (which ensure that only the owner of a coin can send money).

Someone who breaks the hash function used by bitcoin could cause a lot of damage (probably manipulate arbitrary places in the block chain, which means he could fake arbitrary transactions, including mining transactions). This would probably be detected sooner or later, widely pulicized, and most probably, bitcoin would need to be restarted with a different hash function.

Someone who breaks the signature algorithm could steal bitcoins by making transactions on bitcoins that are not his own. Again, little could be done except restarting bitcoin with a different signature method.

Luckily, both primitives used in Bitcoin (AFAIK these are SHA256 and ECDSA) are considered secure and were reviewed by thousands of professional cryptographers. If anyone broke them in a meaningful, practical attack, it would break a lot more things than Bitcoin.

Most probably, a break will come slowly: Someone will discover some weaknesses, then someone else will discover some more, and before there is a practical attack that could actually be abused, the Bitcoin system will be migrated to another algorithm. This will pose challenges, and if this is not done in time (e.g. because the community fails to agree on how to do it or because an attack comes suddenly), Bitcoin will probably disappear as soon as the first practical attack is executed.

It usually takes many, many years (decades) before "secure" algorithms are broken.

There is also the threat from quantum computers. If someone (e.g. the NSA) manages to build one, they have broken ECDSA. Revealing (and proving) a working, sufficiently powerful quantum computer would mean ECDSA is broken and Bitcoin needs to migrate before the first attack becomes known or it will die.

If you do this on a regular basis, don't forget to look into non-bitcoin transfer methods too. If a simple bank transfer is too expensive, there are money transfer services that could be cheaper. Don't get tricked - make sure to look for the entire amount. Some services (e.g. xoom) offer extremely low fees, then scam you on the exchange rate.

With Bitcoin, you have the fees from buying and then again fees from selling. It may well be cheaper than the overpriced transfer services, but it doesn't have to. Additionally, you have an exchange rate risk (the BTC rate can fluctuate during the transaction). Especially given that there is a possibility that the current high exchange rate is a bubble that can quickly burst, you may want to consider this.