Gary,
The two programs are entirely separate - BeerSmith 2 does not touch BeerSmith1's data except to read in the files when you tell it to import your BeerSmith 1 stuff.
The problem is likely a change in user permissions or system settings on your computer (UAC setting is a popular issue for example). Here are some locations to look for your old BeerSmith Recipes.bsm file.
By default BeerSmith is in the "C:\Program Files\BeerSmith" directory, along with your data files Recipes.bsm, Recipe1.bsm, Recipe2.bsm, etc (the latter are backup files).
However under Vista you may also have a "Compatibility files" directory that shows up on the toolbar when you go to the BeerSmith directory. This is where your data and the opts file likely lives. The full path to the compatibility diectory is: C:\Users\{USERNAME}\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\BeerSmith
where {USERNAME} is your login name for Vista/Win 7.
Note that on many systems this is a hidden/system directory which will not show up unless you go into the options for Windows file explorer and set it to show hidden/system files.
Cheers,
Brad