SQL server on VMWare restart loses five days of data
The problem was never definitively resolved. What was found was that at some point their database was completely truncated by an unknown command. Every time they tried to restore the database and roll forward, they were re-truncating their DB. 

They started rolling forward a little bit at a time until they found the moment when it went bad. At that point they cut me out of the troubleshooting loop so I was not able to participate in the post-mortem. My guess is that someone did something really stupid on the database and they didn't want me to dig too deeply.