Damn. I knew somebody would ask eventually....
I got distracted by the arrival of a lovely Nikon Coolscan V film scanner, and got stuck into scanning all of my parent's slides. The aim is to hand the files over to rellies for Christmas, but that's looking optimistic. I've done about 1,200, so getting good at it. Naturally I'm filing these very carefully.
I did get hold of Lightroom, (Mixture's suggestion) and it does everything that I want for the future very well.
As far as the unjumbling of nigh on infinite copies of directories is concerned, I was only really comfortable with windows explorer in multiple windows, and just used that and some search tricks that I learned. I've spent far too long with conventional directory structures to give full control to something like Lightroom, although as I probably said earlier, I have been a huge fan of the way that Picasa does the searching and sorting (without moving files) since it first launched years ago.
I haven't finished the job and, as usual with things computer, can't remember quite how I was doing it. I'll return to it after Christmas and when my memory is refreshed I'll pass on the tips.
I hope that gives you a valid excuse for not doing any of yours until next year? If you want to get yourself an extra festive gift I would say that having several 3tb hdds is very handy for this job. I've used two which are exclusively pictures until the whole thing is finished. (I'm doing all the sorting on one and then copying the work in progress to the other, whilst leaving the originals where they were scattered around the pc and other drives for now).