Will someone help me with Vista Home Premium Backup problems?

I am having untold trouble with the Backup in Vista Home Premium.

After about a year of fooling around my system was clogged with a bunch of nonsense and I decided to do a full Recovery and return everything to factory settings. I did a full system backup at that time (Sept 19, 2008). I tried to make a set of Recovery disks but the OS would not allow it (I still don’t know why).

I formatted and proceeded with the Recovery. That much was successful. When I tried to restore my files the OS wouldn’t cooperate (I thought maybe I needed an upgrade to Vista but people at Best Buy have tried to access the backup without success). At this time I was allowed to make the one set of Recovery disks allowed by my OS. I have them available but they remain untested. Now the OS will not allow me to do a backup. All attempts, before and after the Recovery, have been made through the Backup and Restore Center of Vista Home Premium.

Do you have any idea what I am doing wrong? I would really like to get those data files back from the backup I made in Sept. I have retained them in hopes that some time or some how I might be able to get it back. Currently I am running without any sort of backup and that makes me very uncomfortable.