HELP..... Drive Image XML left me up the creek without a paddle

I used in the past Drive Image XML to do a full system backup of my windows XP machine with no issues. Browsed it for files and even did a full system restore with no issues. Well, made one final backup, wiped, and installed Windows 7 on my PC. Thinking incase I didn't like 7 I could restore my machine and if I did like 7 I could load some home movies etc I could restore them off my external harddrive like I've done before. Well, something is corrupt in the files and I'm having no luck getting into the thing to even browse it. Tried getting into the image from both the 7 machine and my wifes XP machine so it's not a 7 issue. I don't need the whole image, but I'd like to get somethings back outta of it. Need help/ideas. Thanks.

 

I've tried to run it as an administrator, disabled UAC, and run in XP compatability mode with no luck. It won't browse the files at all and if I try to do a full restore it gets 99% done and fails. No particular code that I remember, just unable to write the boot sector and it kills that partition of the hard drive so I have to reformat

 

No ideas???