It did that to me once, with one of my users. I had to go into PHPMyAdmin and remove him...
Curious. Did this happen right after you patched to 1.2.1. Also what is his usergroup and secondary usergroup permissions?
This happened right after I patched to 1.2.1..
only (first) usergroup: administrators
This could relate to your problem with the search results missing forum names. The problem is due to the fact that older versions of MyBB were buggy that when you deleted a forum the threads, posts & moderators from child forums were not deleted.
Has the user ever been a moderator?
That would be why
Does running fixparentlist.php work?
No, that's why I lost those threads.