Mounting old HD disk image changes preferences

I have a late 2011 13-inch Macbook Pro running OS X El Capitan. Sometimes when I am in need of an old file I will mount an image of my old HD (same computer when it ran Mavericks). When I do this, the system preferences will revert to those of the old image. Certain programs will attempt to use the old application support files as well. This leads to the system coming to a crawl as it attempts to index the volume despite spotlight having /volumes/ excluded (since it uses the old preferences). The image is read only, so I can't change the preferences to exclude the volume after it switches. It also wouldn’t help with the licensing errors and other issues I get for certain programs that are trying to use the 3 year old files. How can I browse the image without any program but finder attempting to access them?