Just read your story for the week! Good readin'!
I have done a similar thing. Back in my bass fishin, lure chunkin, Boat-with-a-big-motor drivin' days, a buddy and I get all the way up to Sam Rayburn lake, about a 2 hour run, get ready to put the boat in the water, and I can't find the key. Anywhere. By the way, you can't hotwire a boat. I tried. just ended up blowing a good number of fuses.
We still got to fish, we just didn't get to go as far. At least the trolling motor didn't need a key.

On another note, you may not need the program to copy the pictures from your camera. If your using Windows XP or Vista, just plug the camera in, turn it on, and click on your "My Computer" icon on the desktop. If you look in the list of drives, you should now have a drive labeled E:, with the brand of your camera after it. Your pictures should be in the "DCIM" directory on that drive. You can move, copy and delete right from the camera.
If you are running Microsoft Vista, When you turn the camera on, it should pop up a box asking what you want to do with the drive. Vista has a built-in program that will download the pics for you, to a place you tell it to put them.

If you have any problems or questions, drop me a PM, I'll be glad to help anyway I can.

Kirk