i think old versions of ghost will work with vista as long as you're booting to dos and running ghost. This way there is no interaction with the OS. Ghost itself is a low level system. It copies bits off the drive and saves them to a file. If you put the same bits in the same place on the disk, you can expect the same results, if you're using the same hardware.
Acronis True Image touts being able to restore to different hardware
soon im going to try to virtualize a physical machine. the plan is to boot to knoppix (linux live cd) and run dd piped to gzip and split to image the disk. Repeat the process with a different switch in dd to restore the disk to a vm.
Instructions
michi blog: HDD or partition backup with dd
ghost 2003 will never work right with sata drives