I recently had a user clean up a lot of pictures on their computer by moving and deleting them.  The next time the user went into Office Picture Manager, the splash screen would appear but it would never bring up the program (never meaning within 5 minutes - I have read reports that it will eventually open it just takes time).

The problem seems to be the catalog file that OIS.exe (the Picture Manager executable) uses.  Follow these directions to reset the picture manager catalog:

Browse to %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\OIS. Locate the file named OIScatalog.cag, and double-click on it. When asked what you want to open the file with choose Notepad from the list. When it opens you will see a file that looks like the following. Remove any lines that start with mru path. Make sure to remove the entire line including the opening/closing tags. You can also just delete the OIScatalog.cag file, and it will be re-created the next time you open a picture.

I had a situation where I had a non-booting Windows XP but did not know what service pack it was to know which CD to use to repair it.

Using MiniPE and a remote registry tool, navigate to this key:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion

The sub-keys and values under this location will help determine OS and Service Pack versions.

It seems like this problem is related to an iTunes or Firefox update.  If you search the system drive for CoreFoundation.dll and simply rename the copy in the Adobe directory to something else (old-corefoundation.dll for example), it seems to fix the problem.

Mine was in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Photoshop Elements 6.0\

I had a drive that was going out.  Kept getting error 29004 when trying to create a Ghost image of the drive.  The resulting image was useless because when trying to restore it, it said unexpected end of file.  Also when cloning, the drive backed up 120-125% instead of 100 which was strange. 

After researching, I found these options:

This problem appears to be due to the way Ghost is accessing the drive. To resolve the problem, recreate the image using the -FNI switch to start Ghost:

Ghost -FNI

If that does not work, recreate with the -FFX switch also:

Ghost -FFX -FNI

These switches force Ghost to use a different method for accessing the drive.

Alternate cause and solution
If this error occurs regardless of your Ghost version, it is probably due to bad sectors on the destination drive if restoring an image, or due to bad sectors on the source drive if creating an image. Run Scandisk, CheckDisk, or Norton Disk Doctor with a thorough surface test.

If the problem persists, run Ghost with the -BFC switch. This will allow Ghost to ignore up to 500 bad blocks on the destination drive.

To clone a disk that has numerous bad sectors, run Ghost with the -FRO switch. This instructs Ghost to continue cloning regardless of the number of bad sectors.

If the problem continues, contact the hard drive manufacturer and obtain the diagnostic program for your specific hard drive. Run the diagnostic program on the hard drive and see if this resolves the problem.

In Ghost PE on MiniPE I was able to use the -FRO switch by choosing options and force cloning and saving the options.