Need Help with Ghost 14.0

I've been having issues with Ghost for quite some time, but now it appears to not even be working.  I regularly get a slash through the icon in my system tray with a message that reads "Unable to retrieve information from the agent: Access denied"  I also regularly get error messages "EC8F1780" and "ECD00007 Unable to connect to the agent: Service not running" 

 

When I launch Ghost now, I can only get to this screen below.   Here is what I am running

 

Dell XPS M1530 w/ Vista   backing up to a Maxtor 320GB external drive. Approx 100GB of that drive are available

 

Ghost 14.0.4.30167

 

Any help provided is appreciated

Ghost.jpg