My wifes laptop uses vista and she keeps all our pictures and stuff on it. Well, something went on the mobo and HP want it back to fix it. As they told me that the drive would be wiped I wanted to get all our stuff off of it. I got the files transferred over to my Mandriva machine but the permissions are screwy. It tells me that I am the owner and it is my group but it shows the folder as locked and won't let me do anything with them. I've tried chown and chgrp to no avail. It seems to me that with the -R option it should switch the permission but it isn't.

Normally I have no problems accessing Windows administrator's files from a Linux machine when copied over. It could be you had Vista setup to encrypt the folder. In which you may be hooped if they've already wiped the drive.
May want to google to see if you can take ownership from another Vista machine as admin to access the contents.

Well, they came out of the My Documents folder so I think that has some sort of encryption doesn't it? That sucks. When she gets it back I'm wiping out Vista and putting on Mandriva. Thanks!

Where was the destination of these file? If it was an external drive with an ntfs or fat32 filesystem, then you need to change the permissions when you mount the filesystem. Look at these files in the console. What are the permissions and ownership looking at the long listing?