Win7 had an occassional timing issue where it would try to start before the profile could be read so it would boot to a temp profile. The main symptom is that all the user's files and desktop icons were gone. I would just have them reboot then it would be fine but it would need a tuneup, chkdsk, delete tmps, etc. as long as the drive wasn't really old. It used to be more common before the move to SSDs instead of HDDs but a Win7 computer's drive is probably really old, so yes, time for a new PC.
In this case the deleted files would have to recovered. I recently use Easus Data Recovery Wizard and was able to restore a lot of files for a client who's photo storage drive crashed. It would be best to pull the drive and do the recovery on another computer. I think the free tool allows up to 2GBs of data recovery but in this case the client had 100's of GBs so he paid for a 30 day license for $65.
In this case the deleted files would have to recovered. I recently use Easus Data Recovery Wizard and was able to restore a lot of files for a client who's photo storage drive crashed. It would be best to pull the drive and do the recovery on another computer. I think the free tool allows up to 2GBs of data recovery but in this case the client had 100's of GBs so he paid for a 30 day license for $65.