Vista - backup and restore

i have recently bought a dell laptop running vista ultimate. it developed a
fault and dell said that they had to re-install the operating system. so i
ran the backup function, storing my data on a flash drive.
after reinstallation of the operating system, i tried to restore the data
(the folder is visible on the flash drive) but i get an error dialogue box
headed Windows Backup which says

there was an unexpected error. backup has not been set up on this computer.
an administrator must first create a backup before you can restore files
(0x810000EE). backup will now close.

can anyone advise me what this means, and if i can recover all my historical
data from my flashdrive?
--
zzzzjohn

Wow, it looks like you and I are the only two people on the internet with this problem. I'm trying to restore an image I created on an external harddrive, and am getting the same message about not being able to restore because an administrator hasn't created a backup yet. Even though I did create a complete system backup like, two hours ago.

I tried right-clicking and running as an administrator, but that didn't help. Maybe I will google about disabling the UAC thing.