A nonlinear fault-tolerant control and active vibration suppression design approach is presented in this paper. In the presence of flexible satellite with actuator faults, orbit control force and environment disturbance, a nonlinear adaptive fault-tolerant control approach is designed for the flexible satellite attitude control system. The control law is based on H-infinite adaptive method and designed to stabilize the attitude system under actuator failures cases and its stability analysis is given by Lyapunov function. On this basis, an active vibration suppression compensator is designed to increase the attitude control accuracy and decrease the influence of flexibility on system stability by using similar design method. At last, the fault-tolerant control and vibration suppression design approach is applied to the flexible satellite attitude system in the reaction flywheel failures cases. The simulation results which demonstrate the fault-tolerant ability and vibration suppression performance can be successfully achieved.