I have a friend that has Vista and it crashed last night.  It gave him an error to the effect of Invalid user, cannot logon.  He could not logon as adminstrator.  It seemed his profile was corrupted or deleted.  Anyway he has to retore it to an earlieer time and set up a new profile.  He lost a lot of files such as docs and pictures.  My question is could it be that the info is still there?  Is there a way to recover it?  Thanks for the help.

Vista doesn't usually delete documents stored to the individual accounts if you did manage to corrupt the account. You should be able to find the files under C:\Users\(old user name)\Documents, provided that it was only the account that became corrupted. Try not to rely on the built in restore options in Windows, as they can be unpredictable in what files they restore, unless you're absolutely sure of what you're doing.

I agree with Hex, find a way to recover the important data before messing with the account settings. If you don't have a second computer handy, my favorite trick is to boot up a Linux live CD and move the files around that way. As a last resort, you can move all the files you want backed up to the Program Files folder, then reinstall Vista. Vista will automatically move those files to a folder called Windows.old, which you can access after it's installed.

It is my understanding that is how he got back on but he still had to set up a new admin account just to log on.

If that's the case he might just want to hire a local computer technician to handle the problem. They can be expensive, but it's the best solution if he doesn't really trust himself with a computer.