Ghosting is the way to go if you want a full restore, my hassle with it for home is I don't have any media that can support the full image (I know the PC has firewire and USB, so a second external drive isn't that much money, just never got around to it).

I would never try to restore the OS for the current versions of windows from backup, I would restore the OS first, then probably the applications, then bring back just the data from backups.

Remember 3.11 when you could just copy a programs directory to another machine and it ran just fine? Miss those days sometimes.