Alex
If you can find the files with a search, it's likely that you have the
Volume Shadow Copy service running, you may not be able to recover the
account, but you may be able to recover the important files from that
account.
Open Windows Explorer and click the C: drive. (Assuming that C: is where
Vista is installed.) In the right side window, locate the Users Folder and
right click it. Select Properties / Previous Versions Tab.
Select the latest version of the Users folder and click Open. A Windows
Explorer window should open. Make sure that the Navigation Pane is enabled.
(Organize / Layout / Navigation Pane)
In the Navigation Pane, look at the top and locate the Public Folder. Expand
this folder and create a new folder and name it Recovery.
In the Navigation Pane, you will see an item called Local Host with the
previous version Users folder underneath it. Expand the Users folder there
and then expand the 'Username' folder you need to recover.
You should be able to drag any of the files/sub folders in this folder to
the Recovery folder you created. Don't try to drag the entire 'username'
folder or you will likely run into permission problems.
Play around with this, if a file you want to recover is not in the folder
you opened from the Previous Versions list, try another previous version of
the folder.