[various helpful suggestion from Stephen - SNIPPED]
>
> Stephen

Thanks for your suggestions. The Scotsman was able to find another help article on MS that shed more light on the problem. It seems that there's some sort of buggy interaction between Windows XP and .TIF files. And there's currently no fix for it, the article merely notes that the bug exists.

It makes sense to me, too, because until I got my digital camera in March, I wasn't saving large amounts of TIF files on my PC, which is probably why I never experienced the problem until recently. I seem to have "fixed" the problem by converting all my archived TIF files into JPEGs. (And yeah, I know not to go back and work on them in JPEG format because every time you save them you lose more image information to lossy compression.)

I did lose a whole folder of hi-res images, but at least I still have the lo-res JPEGS.

Gri"gives Stephen some loose change and a big bad bottle of apple juice"shny