Acronis TI 10 - OS crash investigation

Running Windows Vista.

I have tried using ATI as a form of system backup software. My experience was the worst data loss disaster I've ever had. To shorten the description of what went wrong I will list only the most relevant of events. Those of you interested in the full story, it's later on in this post.

-made full backup image of drive
-ATI reported that the image was corrupt during pre-boot restore aswell as when trying to read it in any way from the pre-boot app; inside the OS however it reads the image just fine
-ATI corrupted the MBR on two different drives every time it tried pre-boot restore, regardless of wether it was restoring to the same drive it was installed on or not, on both a highly-used and a 100% clean, fresh Vista install; issue occurred on 2 different drives
-when restoring to the same drive it is installed on it reports image corruption, as stated above, and when restoring to a different drive the process halts at 0%. reboot is required. and after reboot the OS cannot start reporting "MBR error 1"(running AWARD BIOS btw)
-although loading a pre-boot restore corrupts the MBR every time, installing and running the pre-boot loader(F11) does not cause such corruption
-issue has occurred with both the pre-boot loader installed and not installed

ATI has, with that, infused terror upon me. However, a programmer at heart, I know such issues don't just happen, and can be troubleshot to their source, if possessing enough information. Anyone here ever tried ATI 10 on Vista? If so, post your experience. Though a first-time user, ATI seems to have quite a reputation, so I'd like to know why it won't do for me.

FULL STORY:
-installed ATI 10, installed pre-boot loader, created a full snapshot and an incremental and stored them on another drive, created SecureZone, tweaked the app a bit, worked fine
-decided to test it and restore the drive. it asked to reboot. said image was corrupt on both the incremental and full backup.
-rebooted. windows would not load, saying there is a problem with the drive contents and asking to press enter to reboot. always the same result
-inserted vista dvd and found that partition had been erased. tried recovery tools, was a no go. did not want to reinstall on the now unallocated partition space because I had data recovery tools and knew overwriting damages data.
-installed vista on the drive where the backup had been stored
-tried partition table doctor but in the end ended up accidentally creating a new partition over the old one. in addition, windows immediately wtote its system volume information, recycler, and bootsector.bak on it. whatever data were on the partition were probably now in part overwritten. deleted left-over SecureZone partition.
-ran ATI from windows, opened backup. image could be open without corruption errors. decided to restore the partition back to the drive. reboot was required.
-restarted, the pre-boot restore kicked in, no corruption errors but it froze with no progress. mouse still moved. rebooted.
-received "MBR error 1, insert backup floppy and press [forgot key] to retry'. had no recovery floppy. every subsequent retry would report MBR error 2
-popped the vista dvd in again and tried recovery options. again to no avail, but unlike my first disaster this time the partition had not been erased. reinstalled vista over the broken one, again reinstalled ATI on it.
-installed vista back on the partition I had lost thinking the data is lost beyond recovery anyway. did it in order to try "stitch" back together the old vista.
-went back into the vista and deleted ALL the files(except undeletable Boot folder, was being used?) of the newly-installed vista. that left an empty drive which still had the vista MBR.
-ran ATI and opened the backup. even though my partition was now gone it had been backed up by ATI just before the incident. copied the files back onto the drive, this time normal copy not partition restore, to avoid the MBR corruptions again.
-restarted and booted the other vista. it worked. using the MBR of a vista install and the files of another vista install I managed to fully recreate my OS and all its files. was relieved.
-deleted the windows install I had used for emergency.