Assuming you email account was "hacked" that doesn't mean they had access to the files on your computer. I might suggest closing the email account and getting a new one. This time use a stronger password and if the email provider offers it, two stage authentication.

Because people tend to use similar passwords, I would strongly suggest changing passwords on all your other online accounts, especially anything financial. If those accounts have "account recovery" questions, change those as well. Make up answers or deliberately misspell words (use "Lassie" instead of "Rover" for your childhood pet or "Mail Street" instead of "Main Street" for a children address). The email associated with those accounts should be changed as well.

If you want some additional information on making passwords that are difficult to crack but easy to remember, Steve Gibson has some good information here.

my guess is that i hit a key on an email too quickly. Hard to avoid that as there are just too many of these coming my way. In any case, I don't see that it really makes a difference... a hack is a hack. I stripped all of my email accounts of any thing sensitive as well as all files on my computer. There is no longer anything on my computer with my real name on it. I backed all these sensitive emails and files including pictures out to a flash drive. I stopped all promo emails from a variety of vendors.

Perhaps the hacker will just get tired and go away.

take my word for it... i have been hacked. And my response is just fine. If there is no data on my computer to go after why would they bother with it. They picked up on the false name i use so if they want to try some identify theft using that name...good luck. I can work just fine with what I have to satisfy my needs.

There is a HUGE difference between someone gaining access to your email and your computer being compromised.

You haven't provided any evidence that your computer is hacked. You have provided evidence to the contrary since you scanned your computer and didn't find anything.

Also, if your computer has been hacked, the hacker probably isn't interested in using anything that is actually on your computer but is interested in using your computer to do other malicious things or monitoring your keystrokes to get passwords to financial accounts. Deleting files on your computer isn't going to prevent any of that (assuming your computer has been hacked).

People keep many gigabytes of crap on their computers, hackers aren't going to rummage through all of those files in hopes of finding some valuable morsel. Unless you are a prominent person who is known to have classified documents or something like that on your computer, in which case you might be targeted for the data on your computer.

Mail accounts reside on the service provider's mail server, not on the user's computer. The mail password gives access to the server, not to the user's computer.

Saying that a hacked mail account gives access to the user's computer is equivalent to saying that a hacked post office box combination gives access to get into your house .... and that's not how it works.

If a piece of e-mail came in and the user either opened a nefarious file attachment or clicked a link to a nefarious external site which unleashed malware, then the computer is what got hacked, not the mail account.