I'm not giving up. I'm going to take the card to (1) Walgreens where they have card readers; or (2) Circuit City, where they have a sale on 512 mb card for $29 after rebates - they recovered pics for me before, however that time it was a broken camera; this time it's a corrupt memory card - we'll see what they can do; and if all that fails, my techie friend who teaches at a computer school says they can work on it as a class project.
Never has so much been done for something so little :)