Moving photos w/tags from XPpc to Vista pc using the free starter edition

Question

I have a pc with XP (SP2) with Album 2.0 on which I have a few hundred photos organized with tags and some editing .... many hours of "tagging" invested by me. I just bought a new pc with Vista Home Premium. All I really want to do is be able to import all the exising photos WITH their tags, do very rudimentary editing - primarily redeye reduction, a bit of contrast change occasionally - and be able to add new photos, locate, view, print (home or photo kiosks) and send via email my photos (Outlook 2007) to others. I do NOT want to have spend hours re-tagging all my existing photos if I don't have to do so. From perusing your forum(s) it seems that may be a very complicated procedure for a non-expert user (e.g. I don't know anything about "Access" and don't want to take time to learn).
If I can do what I want (import existing photos into the free starter program (3.2?)) and continue to use that program for redeye reduction and email as well as organize using tags - that would be great. BUT - seems very complicated to me. Perhaps I should use some other free program that will be supported for a long time, like Picassa, and bite the bullet of spending many hours "re-tagging and perhaps re-editing?? It's always a guess as to how long progrmas will be supported, and both Google and Adobe appear as though they'll be around. But any advice will be welcome. I wouldn't be considering Starter except I'm used to to Album 2.0, and have all those hundreds of photos already "tagged" and used redeye reduction on many of them (and don't know whether Picassa or any other program would recognize the exisiting tags and/or the redeye reduction and other editing I did).
Thanks for any help - hopefully in as non-techie language as possible.
Steve

Answer 1

Well I am reading the progress on your situation, trying to pick up some info. While I do not use the Elements starter edition, it has pretty much the same issues with transfereing catalogs from one machine to another and/or migrating from XP to Vista, as the other versions of Elements have.
I have been going through the gyrations of moving V4 on an XP machine to V6 on a Vista machine.
As suggested in other forums, I finally went to a two step process. First I added V6 to the XP machine that has the properly operating V4 on it. I did the conversion process to migrate the catalog to the V6 program. Yeah it does convert, but half the photos ( thousands) are disconnected. Reconnecting one and then doing a reconnect all does not work as suggested by others. Reconnecting all manually just aint going to happen.
I have tried the external hard drive thing and moved the catalog to the Vista machine but the results are the same.
While I am not an expert software person, I do have enough experience to know where the problem lies. It lies directly with Adobe and they have dropped the ball and put a seriously defective product on the market and so far have not fessed up the their responsibility.