Captions and Reorganizing Photos

Question

My wife uses Adobe PSE 4 on her Windows XP laptop and won't switch to the PSE 9 software I bought her.  She has 12,000+ photos in her Organizer catalog, and the underlying files are scattered all over two hard drive partitions.  Many of them are duplicated (the thumbnails and sometimes the files themselves).  Some thumbnails are disconnected and I can't find the files when I try to reconnect them.  Many of them also have Captions that she has painstakingly added over the last 8 years.  Because her drives are almost full, and she is annoyed with all the dupes, but doesn't want to lose her Captions, I have been tasked with getting everything back in order, including getting all the photo files themselves located in a high level directory (folder location).
I created a new "master" directory and started locating/moving some photo files there.  I figured out that after I move them, PSE 4 will reconnect them, with captions, if I select the thumbnails in Organizer and then use Update Thumbnails from the right-click context menu.  However, that's extremely time consuming and unreliable, because once I've moved a batch of files (in Windows Explorer), I have trouble finding them in Organizer photo bin to work with them, and the "batches" of files I've moved are not physically adjacent to each other (by date or whatever) in the Organizer photo bin.  Also, Organizer wants to import files into the new "Watched" master folder location (which may or may not be duplicates, or new files that were never catalogued to begin with).
Is there a faster and easier way to do these basic tasks?:
1. Ensure that the captions stay with the photo files (preferably as part of each file's metadata in case Adobe blows up or loses its PSE catalog links).
2. Move the photo files in Windows Explorer as desired (I'm can handle that part).
3. Recatalog/reconnect the files, making SURE that I don't lose the Captions.  Or the redating she did on many of them when the camera date wasn't set right.
4. Elimate the duplicate files, but only those WITHOUT Captions, so that I don'l lose those WITH Captions.
Yeah, I know this is a pretty big mess, but I've spent hours already researching and trying to do this project.  If there's a better way to do this by upgrading to PSE 9 or a later version, I could do that, but it needs to run reliably on an older laptop with Win XP, and the biggest thing is that if I lose her Captions (or the date changes she's made when the camera had the wrong date), I'm toast.
If there's a way to write the Captions and Dates established in the PSE catalog into each file's metadata, then re-extract that into a completely new catalogue, I could do that, too, perhaps, as a way of getting my arms around this.  That assumes PSE 4 can overwrite the metadata first, then retrieve those fields from the files into the new catalog (but if it can, I have no idea how to do that).
Thanks for any strategy and tips.

Answer 1

You can move the photos within the PSE4 Organizer (in Folder Location View, Alt-Ctrl-3) and then you don't have to reconnect.
You can write the captions to the photos files, for the photos that are connected, via File->Write Tags ...
There are a gazillion threads here on how to find duplicates, I suggest you search for them.
Upgrading to PSE9 won't fix the mess. Starting a new catalog will cause loss of captions and other metadata for disconnected photos. And if you have reconnected the photos, you don't need a new catalog; it won't buy you anything.
Once finished, I suggest you adopt policies that don't cause duplicates, and don't cause dis-connected photos, and that don't wind up with photos all over the hard disk. Not hard to do.