IPhoto '09 - Thumbnails visible but no photos!  (exclamation mark)

Hi everyone,
I'm in a bit of pickle here and I hope someone can help me. I take photos pretty regularly. Nothing mind-blowing, but I use my iPhone to take pics of my dogs, my girlfriend, etc. I sync my phone pretty much everyday and I just realised today that I'm missing a bunch of photos that span over 4-5 months. The thumbnail for the album itself is BLANK, but when I go into the album all the thumbnails for the photos are still there. However, when I try to maximise the photo I get nothing but a big grey exclamation mark.
I have tried different things like 'Open in Finder' and expanding the iPhoto app to show the folders inside and then try to find the photos myself, but nothing seems to work. I have also tried rebuilding my library with no success. I checked my recent Time Machine save, but somehow the iPhoto backup shows the same events in my iPhoto having issues. I don't understand how this could have happened, because I upload and sync my iPhone so often that I should've noticed at one point over the last month that my photos were missing - I have trouble believing I could've missed these missing events over the last month every single time I synced. But my last save shows the same thing and I don't understand how this is possible. I'm stupid for not having backed up my photo collection another way, but I thought I was being pretty careful.
Is there a bug that can cause this? What else can I do to get my photos back? or am I simply S.O.L.? I have read about many horror stories about iPhoto 09 but nothing that covers my situation closely enough to help me.
Any help would be appreciated. I apologise if I wasn't clear or if I didn't give you enough details.
Thanks in advance for any help!

I have what I thought was a similar problem, only now I'm not so sure. It seems instead to be linked to the faces feature.
I recently migrated from a macbook to a macbook pro. However my 30K pictures are contained not on the computer but on a separate external HD. I plugged the HD into the new iphoto '09 and get all the thumbnails. However when I click on one the screen goes dark: no photo. I read this thread but before rebuilding anything, since the photos wouldn't have really been affected by migration assistant, I don't think, I decided to just quit iphoto and see if things fixed themselves this way. When I reopened iphoto indeed the pictures do load at first, but then after faces starts scanning it stops bringing up any photos.
So.... it takes a very long time to scan 30K faces but when it finally does, I get instructions to click on a photo, then on faces and start identifying photos. I can't get that far because, again, when I click on a photo the faces feature does highlight, only I can't see the photo.
¿ Does it really make sense to rebuild the library under these circumstances? I don't see how it can have been affected by the migration.
¿ Any ideas how to get faces to stop disabling access to the full photos, if that's what's happening?
Many, many thanks for your thoughts....
p.s. The old library was set up for iphoto '07 (or whatever came before iphoto '09) and upon trying to open up in iphoto '09 I was prompted to tweak the library for the new software ... I wonder if that could have resulted in a need to rebuild?
TIA!!

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