I only deleted what seemed to be the .torrent files, not any of the folders.
I eventually figured out that (breaking the first law of system design) the executable file was mixed in with the data files, and it had been deleted. I copied over the most recent installation file I had into that folder, ran it, and got the option "Newer version installed, do you want to go back to Version 7.9.9?" Since I knew the newer version was gone, I chose 'Yes' and an older version was installed. It did run successfully and picked up all the outstanding torrents. However, when I tried to update, it said no newer version was available. I thought that might be because of the update folders for newer versions, and deleted all beyond the 7.9.9 version, but that didn't make a difference.