msher;
Hello and welcome to the forums. It would be helpful to know what software you used to backup the old vista computer and if the same software is present on the new Win7 computer. What format is the backup in (file extension (.vhd, .tib))? If you used the normal Vista backup which I believe uses a .VHD file extension, have you tried mounting (attaching) the .VHD backup using the disk management utility in Windows 7? That should allow you to browse the backup and drag and drop files to the new location on the Win7 machine. If you are talking about recovering your programs, then you are most likely out of luck, you'll need to re-install them.
Good luck and keep us posted.
Regards
Randy