This gets a bit technical... maybe someone can translate if there is difficulty.
So firstly, when you attempt to restore the backup file you found, after selecting that file and clicking 'next' do you see the restore screen with a list of profiles and options, or does it hang before that? If you do get to this screen, try just recovering a few by selecting the "Restore Specific" option and then selecting random few. If that works then the backup may be partly damaged but you can still start manually restoring the collection in groups - it will take more effort but in this way you may at least get most of that backup restored.
If the above method fails you should also search for any other copies of the ".dbp" files and for any ".dbp.bak" files as by default Profiler optionally keeps one previous copy by renaming it that way. Maybe these also got stored with the files you found. If the one you have is corrupted then these may offer other choices. Compare file sizes and dates, that may indicate their state. Depending on the size of the collection, and if the backup also included images, these could be a few MB to GB.
Similarly, as listed in Mithi's wiki, if there are any complete backups of his 'My Documents' folders you can directly take the data from the "\DVD Profiler" folder. Just copy the whole lot into your own same folder and there's a good chance you can just open it directly.
For retrieving the online copy, there are a couple of possibilities to go further... the next question is if you can find his Profiler registration key. If so, then you can log in to the account on this site
here with just a first and last name plus the key, at which point you may be able to change the password for the account and then retrieve the current online collection.
If successful,
be very careful to select 'Download' as an accidental Upload will erase that online collection, and Upload is the default selected action! If you can't find his registration key, there are some forensic methods to possibly recover this from the old system's registry hive... assuming that disk is present and readable. This more difficult path requires having the system boot disk that originally had his working Profiler installed.
This gets into a technical recovery path that I'm rusty in, and monkeying in the registry is risky, and the methods needed for this recovery are advanced so I'll hold off specific notes here for the moment until other easier paths are explored.) In short it requires copying and then loading the registry hive from the crashed system into another to extract specific keys that have the registration info, and maybe even the login credentials
if they were optionally stored.
Condolences, and I hope this info helps your work.