Thank you for giving me so much of your time to resolve this issue. I live in Australia so your invitation of accepting a phone call from me may not be possible. With respect to the file backups, I also found Time Machine to be unreliable so I switched to using Carbon Copy Cloner which appears to making a good job of backing up. I can not speak for the issue of corruption however.
In order to eliminate any possibility of VMWare causing all of the problems, I have created a new VMWare machine using Windows 7 and it has installed correctly. However, this still does not help me get the original files and programs from the first Windows 7 machine. Is there any way of just moving or importing the settings from the original machine to the newly created one?