I have the bad habit of formatting and wiping my disk too often. It's becoming tedious so I finally backed up my RAIDed 0 OS partition to an external 40 gig drive via Vista Ultimate's backup entire PC.

1. When I boot to the DVD and choose repair will it install everything (i.e. registry, etc.) or will some of my programs be broken with incorrect paths etc.?

2. Am I to assume that this "image" will identical to my current install?

1. Most likely it will, but I'm not familiar with RAID.

2. Yes, it's an exact copy of the current installation (but once again, I'm not familiar with RAID, so I'm unsure of how it's implemented).

Yes it will make an exact clone of your backup. Although now I have an option screen
Asking what os I would like to boot. I had to do a complete reinstall.