Thanks for the info so far. I have the photos as files about 400 KB JPG each. There are several special ones of 10MB and more. I have years 1969, from the Trucial States days up to 2009 as year files, all in one pictures file. 16,825 files size 15,3 GB. Yes it looks like an external hard drive or a couple of 8GB flash memories.
When I get that done I will clear the whole hard drive and reload Vista. I used to wipe Windows 3.1 and Win 95, etc, every few months. It seemed to solve a lot of problems. Can this be done, a clean start with Vista?
AV is AVG Free version 8.5, mainly set "off" when I am sorting. Empty space on hard drive about 20GB