What you could do is get Picasa 3 if you don't have it, install that and when started the first time it should ask if you want it to search your whole compter for images (or you can find that option in the settings). Let Picasa grind away on that and when its done it will have a database and thumbs of all the photos it finds.
Most of the photos of interest will probably already be in your My Pictures (just Pictures in Vista) though they may be in specific sub folders made by other programs. Then if you find a folder of photos that isn't in your Pictures directory (if that's where you want to put them all) you can either click on the folder icon (in Picasa 3) at the begining of each set of pictures displayed in that folder, or right click on one of the pictures and choose Locate on Disk. This will open up the folder with those photos and then you can copy or move them to where you want them to be.
You can also do that directly in Picasa by selecting the photos in a folder and right click and choose Move to folder...
When you have them all in one location, like in the My Pictures folder and subfolders therein, you only have to point the Adobe photo browser or open file... command to the My Pictures folder of whatever subfolder in My Pictures that your photos are in and they will all be there all the time...for any graphics program ordered to store the photos the way you want them to be, not how it wants to do things.
Good luck
