Accessing MetaData on a user

Hi 

I have a bit of a tricky problem.  I am using the profile manager plugin to capture addtional data from a new user upon regitration with elgg.  In addtion to this I'm using the uservalidationbyemail plugin.

There is a particular item of data that I need to access during the email confirmation process.  I need to access the data after the user click on the confirmation link but before the user in enabled.

I have tried numerous way to get the data $user->data, elgg_get_metadata() but these methods return null values.

Can anybody tell me how to access a users entity metdata before the user has been enabled within elgg.