May I ask how you screwed it up? Just curious.

anyone else think its fishy?

Yes, I second that. You will roughly have the character length and possible variations. You obviously entered the pass twice to change it, so you cant be that far wrong. With this in mind you can significantly reduce the required searchable keyspace. So stick with it...

You could also try having a few more beers and trying again. Might get lucky... or unlucky

There's not another administrator account on the machine where you can just reset it?

As mentioned earlier, there are utilities, such as konboot, that can reset passwords.

You might want to hold off on either method if she was using EFS though.

With this being your wife's computer and the fact that you have physical access to it, as a last resort if you can't reset the password so you can gain access you could remove the hard drive from her computer and connect it to another.  Once you boot the computer you would just copy the contents over from one hard drive to another and then format, reload and then copy the backed up data over to her computer again.  If this is a laptop you would need a device to connect the hard drive to another system but this would be no problem with a PC.  Before you go that route though what OS is your wife's computer running?  Once that is answered I will have more suggestions to try.

I was assuming Windows as well and should have worded it as such I guess .  I should have just mentioned it in my previous post about trying to log on to XP using administrator as the log in with no password and not being able to use the administrator account in Windows Vista and 7 to try this since it is disabled by default.  If it helped that'd be less work he would have to do.  Just adding my two cents.

@Marcos_NJ - Boot the box to live Backtrack or Samurai cd / dvd, browse the drive(s) and get your data off of it...