Corrupted Photo Hides iPhoto Library from other iLife apps

Question

I was recently using iMovie HD to create a movie for church and wanted to insert some still images given to me by the pastor. I imported the images into iPhoto, but found that iMovie reported that I needed to "Launch iPhoto 2 or later to populate this list."
I am a regular user of iPhoto 6 for my own personal needs, and have launched it dozens of times on my computer, so this puzzled me. I checked the help files and found under the article entitled "I don't see any photos in the Photos pane," which simply says that I must be using iPhoto 4 or higher and have opened iPhoto at least once, both of which are true, but I relaunched iPhoto just in case, but to no avail.
Checking to see if the problem was with iMovie, I found that I also had no access to my photos from iDVD, so the problem seems to be with iPhoto.
I also checked out Apple's support database, and found the article at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=75491, "iLife: Cannot See iPhoto Files in Other iLife Applications." Following these instructions, including the recreation of the XML file, yielded no positive results.
After some experimenting with iPhoto/iMovie on other computers and in other accounts, I found that when I imported a particular set of pictures was when the pictures disappeared from iMovie. I tried deleting these pictures from my own main iPhoto library, but the problem was not solved. I finally found out that once the corrupted photo had been imported into iPhoto, nothing I would do would allow the iPhoto pictures to be viewable from other applications.
I eventually solved this by renaming my iPhoto library, using GraphicConverter to convert the suspect files in batch mode and importing the converted files into a new iPhoto library. This at least allowed me to get the movie finished, but I now have two iPhoto libraries on my computer, only one of which is visible to other iLife applications.
I found out that if I held down some keys while launching iPhoto, I would be given the option to rebuild the iPhoto library using four checkboxes: Rebuild small thumbnails, Rebuild all thumbnails, Rebuild Library database and recover orphaned photos. I've done all four to no effect.
So, after all of that, my final question is, is it possible to restore my iPhoto library such that I can again access it from other iLife applications without losing the many albums I've created?
Thanks,
Chuck

Answer 1

So far, no go with iPhoto Library Manager, although the program and the help files that come with it have suggested some leads.
First of all, when I open iPhoto Library Manager, it reports:
The album data file for this library is malformed.
XML parser errors:
Encountered unexpected character k on line 59525
Old-style plist parser error:
Malformed data byte group at line 1; invalid hex
So I opened AlbumData.xml in BBEdit and checked out line 59525 (as suggested by the iPhoto Library Manager help files) and found that it looked like this:
<string> <key>274</key>
Above it is the line:
<key>771</key>
Most <key><string> pairs look like this:
<key>XXX</key>
<string>KeywordName</string>
So for some reason, the problem line isn't closing the string tag. I tried editing the keyword that came after the problem line, but it didn't fix the parse error. From what I can tell, manually editing the AlbumData.xml file won't solve the problem, as iPhoto only writes to it for other applications, and doesn't read it. The next time I launch iPhoto, it would simply write the same data.
I also checked for the string 771 in the file as that's the keyword ID that appears before the parse error, but it's only found in relation to an album and a roll.
Because of this, iPhoto Library Manager can't rebuild the library. However, the help files do offer the author's email address, and it's obvious that he's spent time looking into this type of problem (the help files describe exactly the problem behavior I'm having with the error message seen in iMovie). So I'm going to zip up the AlbumData.xml file and send it to him. While I do that, I may look through the keywords more closely and see if any of them look like they have suspect characters. Perhaps renaming them will solve the problem.
Of course, this keyword clue doesn't explain why importing un-keyworded photos would cause the problem in the first place, but if I can get it fixed, I'll be happy.