No pictures recovered from Vista backup restoration

After wiping out my laptop hard drive and restoring my files made with Vista Home Premium Backup, all the folders for my pictures were there but no contents. I have asked for help on two other forums, but all I get are stock answers which don't address my problem. While hunting I found some information which makes me think they are lost forever. It seemed to indicate that I backed up files but not images. I followed the instructions (which appear to be lacking in some aspects.) I tried (briefly) to open some backup files to see if I could locate where the pics should be, but the computer wouldn't open the files after uncompression. I haven't told my wife yet that all the pics are missing!

 

As I mentioned, I routinely backed up using Vista Home Premium backup over a several week period. When I tried to restore, at first I was told that the files were not on my hard drive. After hunting for the reason, I found that wiping out the hard drive made this a different computer, so I had to restore that way. All my files came thru. Even the folders for all my pictures. But no pictures in the folders. I do have some pictures which I copied to a DVD, but I would be missing a lot because of relying upon the Vista backup, which didn't tell me it wasn't going to back up pictures (if that's the case.)