Good news/bad news to report. The good news is you were right: I did make that error, and upon retrying it I was able to make the transition to '09 by copying the "good" faces.dat over the newly corrupted one. The picture links were retained and I was able to move forward.
The bad news is the crashes continue beyond this point and seemingly become more frequent. Rather than just happening at the turn of the season, they occur at times during a normal mid-season save. So I can't reliably save my file and then copy the faces.dat file since any save could generate a crash.
Where it stands right now, I have to be extremely careful going forward to keep a backup copy of files.dat because any save from the start of '09 on could bring on a crash. However, it does at least seem that copying over a "good" faces.dat after a crash will restore the picture links. So it looks like I'm down from "full-blown crisis" to "major irritation". Hey, it's a start.
Again, major thanks to you Nutlaw for the
outstanding suport on this issue. Cheers, mate!