Hi,
Just read your post. I have been running most of my gaming on my Vista laptop so I had to install the program on my Win7 laptop to see your problem. I did not have any VBRun problems, so I will have to guess it is some other problem.
One differance between Vista and Win7 is the way (or place) games get saved. Character Editer will be looking in;
C:\Users\ (your user name) \Documents\My Games\Freelancer\Accts\SinglePlayer. If these are differant you will get an error opening the program. One other thing you can try is to open the IonCross menu and right-click the IonCross program and choose run as administrator. This will usually cure 90% of the problems opening programs on Win7 AND Vista. You can also right-click and choose properties and in the compatability tab click the "Run the program as an administrator" box. I do not believe the WinXP compatability is necessary, it runs straight-out on my Win7 machine.
One other thing, sometimes antivirus software will interfere in the running of a program. So what I do is tell it to view the program as an installer. This may or may not be related to your problem.