Thanks for that link to BreezeBrowser, I will give it a shot. It looks like exactly the thing I was looking for.

Thanks for the other information, everyone. These have been good replies. Here are my comments on the various things so far:

Bmiller: As for battery life, turn off the screen as much as possible.

That's good information. It is true that I spent a lot of time messing around looking at pictures on the built-in screen, so it's likely that this was the reason the battery drained so quickly. Makes sense.

Bmiller: Using a card reader saves battery on your camera as well.

This is a good point and I think I shall look into how much a separate CF->USB reader costs.

Synergy: I never installed the stuff that came with the camera. I did get a 4-8M download from their website tho.

So did I, I grabbed their TWAIN driver and it worked. I can open the camera files directly in my imaging application. My problem is that they are not saved to my hard disk when I do it that way, they still have to be "SaveAs'd" each and every one, which would be irritating for a cardful of photos. I was looking for more something inbetween, a way to quickly dump all the images to a specified hard disk folder. Their included ZoomBrowser does this, I just needed to figure out how to pare down all their utilities to the bare minimums.

DiGNAN17: (and I didn't know zoombrowser took that much!)

Actually, I pared it down to the Twain driver, ZoomBrowser, and PhotoStitch only, and those three together take up 47mb on my hard disk.

Wait, make that 46. Just ripped the Sample images out of the PhotoStitch folder. Already had ripped the "My Camera" images and sounds out of the ZoomBroser directory.

Wait, make that 45. Just ripped the extra camera bitmaps out of the ZoomBrowser directory (only needed the ones for my brand of camera). Next I'll try and see if it works with no camera-brand bitmaps at all.

DiGNAN17: It just saves them to the program's directory (in "Image Library One" or something).

Oh, I got farther than that. I figured out how to feed it a different directory for the images. It now dumps the images into my folder instead of its folder.