Many thanks to all for your interest and advice, I have had a result, the "old" computer (a 3 Ghz pentium4 desktop running XP) has been in the garage since it refused to run for more than 20 mins. so my wife suggested trying it again.
It has now been running for at least 4 hours and I managed to extract all of the photo's to a new disc, result, and at least she is happy
Regards, Den.
(And the spastic disc is now a coaster in my shed!)