A friend has a windows system that has been royally screwed up by viruses, spyware and people trying to help her. She has a lot of pictures on the hard drive that she wants to save before I reinstall the OS. Is there a live CD that I can use to access the windows system and upload all those pics via Firefox to an online location, so that the pics can be saved?

Any of the Linux LiveCDs will work. Knoppix, Kanotix, Slax, Ubuntu, etc.

Rather than using Firefox to upload the pictures, which would take quite a bit of bandwidth if there are really lots of them, you can burn a CD with them. I believe most (or all) of the Linux LiveCD's allow you to boot the thing totally into ram, which frees up your CD drive for burning. Things like Knoppix will require a lot of ram to boot this way (1 Gb is good), but smaller distros like Slax can boot totally into ram using far less ram. You might even be able to get my with 256 for one of the smaller custom Slax versions (I'm thinking Slax's "Popcorn Edition"). I imagine barebones Slax Frodo Edition or Damn Small Linux or Puppy Linux can probably boot themselves into only 128Mb of ram. You'll have to use commandline stuff to burn CDs with these small distros. You won't be finding a nice GUI burner like K3B on these small guys. Commandline "cdrecord" will have to suffice.

If your friend had 1Gb of ram, sure, boot Knoppix into that. And you'll have a full set of nice GUI-based tools to work with, if that's your preference. And you won't believe has fast the system will run!

I have played with several live CD's but never attempted to do anything with them other then to see what the possibilities are for window managers, I have always used Debian (testing and unstable). Going on your thought (transfer to cd), how difficult would it be to get thumb drive (pen, flash, whatever) working and do the same thing? I have several laying around.

I've written to pendrives from Knoppix easily. At the moment I can't remember if they simply automounted when I plugged them in, or if I had to manually mount them. I believe they automounted, but I can't say for 100% certain.

I guess the biggest issue is which live CD can access an ntfs formatted drive?

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that Knoppix will even automount NTFS partitions. Ultimately, any LiveCD should do, you would just need to install NTFS support if it doesn't have it.

ntfs shouldnt be a problem for any liveCD