The sad update on my photos... 
(
Well, thanks to all of you who tried to help me last week. I appreciate each and every one of your kind suggestions.
I thought I would send out an update to those who are interested or those who may come across this thread later, hoping for a miracle..... nothing seemed to work for me and if your circumstances are the same, I wish you all the very best of luck with your situation, but I would not spend as much time on it as I did, as losing well over a week of use of my cell phone was absolutely unnecessary in the end. I was just too hopeful, naive (or stubborn) to accept that my photos were no longer within reach.
FYI, I tried one final last ditch thing this morning and it was unsuccessful too, so I ended up going to the apple store today and they reset my phone. Of course everything is gone, but I then went to the AT&T store and they went in and reloaded all my contacts from my old SIM card, so that worked out okay.
And I acknowledge, as many of you mentioned, if I had only taken the few minutes and synched it with my laptop once, I could have gone in and bypassed the passcode to get to my photos. However, since I had not done so, my options were much more limited.
As it was explained to me by a high-up technician at apple, apparently, and I am repeating for the thousandth time that I am in no way a technical person, the iPhone, although a very good product with many similarities to my laptop, has a much less sophisticated system with only a basic "chip set". So, he explained that unlike my laptop where there they could go through many different "work arounds" to get past the safety/security features, this is not really feasible with my iPhone. Instead, it's quite straight-forward, so short of breaking into the phone (which would void my warranty, and considering I bought this phone only a few weeks ago, that was completely out of the question) there were no further alternatives but to completely reset my phone.
For the record, I/we (all my techie guy friends) tried every suggestion made here (except for the jailbreak thing for reasons previously mentioned) including trying to load through 3 different Windows XP and Vista machines (no dice in either case). I was even put on the phone with the iPhone technical support (for nearly 2 hours) and my call was escalated to the highest level technician (as people at the 3 other levels were unable to help). He even tried 2 more weird things that I cannot even remember what we did, but involved holding down various number keys, home button, power button and computer keyboard keys, while plugging/unplugging and powering the computer up (and he said these had worked in the past), but apparently because the woman at the At&T store that set up my phone and put on the added security feature(s), it was a hopeless case.
So he told me that "Unless you are the president or have very highly-sensitive info on your phone (which is not what it is intended for in the first place) you should never use the SIM PIN & the 'disable after x attempts' features when you activate your phone, as the combination of these obviously makes any salvage impossible".
So, again, to all the sweet people who genuinely tried to help me out with this mess, Hugs and Kisses all around.
I mean it. I appreciate your time and all the smart suggestions you made, and even though they did not work for me, you are still the best in my book and I hope you continue to help others!
And lastly, to the mean-spirited jerk(s) who were of absolutely no help and did nothing but waste everyone's time with their argumentative comments, you all can kiss my shiny hiney!
I am happy to see that the sweet administrators who PM'd me did end up removing your senseless babble. FYI, if you have nothing better to do on a Saturday night but to interfere with the conversations of others, I have three words for you.... Get a life!
