Opening Time-Machine OSX backup files on Windows 7?

Have Time Machine backups on a Western Digital External HD. The Time Machine backups were done on my now dead Mac G4 running OSX Leopard.

I am waiting on a new iMac but in the meantime I need to access some of my backup files urgently. I have a laptop running Windows 7 so is there any safe way of accessing some of the files from the Time Machine backup on my laptop and still be able to do a full restore when the iMac arrives?

I am no Windows expert, and untested, but combining some sources gets me:

To read Mac OS Extended (aka HFS+) disks on Windows, according to Wikipedia:

HFSExplorer is an application for viewing and extracting files from an HFS+ volume (Mac OS Extended) or an HFSX volume (Mac OS Extended, Case-sensitive) located either on a physical disk, on a .dmg disk image, or in a raw file system dump.

It seems that an Ubuntu Live CD also has support for HFS+.

Once you have access to the drive you will see a structure of folders. This screenshot from the HFSExplorer web site shows such Time Machine backup folder:

Browsing to Backups.backupd/<computer name>/Latest should get you your latest backup. Your documents will be in the sub folder <hard disk name>/Users/<user name>.

And even though there's no need to make any changes to the disk: remember to always use something "Safely remove hardware" before unplugging the disk from Windows (just like you would "eject" it on a Mac).