I went ahead and signed up on the $4.99 a month plan. That stops them from freezing up the computer. The pictures I'm trying to replace in the threads now are ones I downloaded to my computer and then deleted from Photobucket as I tried to get the image number down into something which wouldn't give me warning messages about having too many images.
So, I have the pix on my computer and am uploading them to imgur, and then to here. Of course since the Akro pix were the most important to me, those are the ones I made inaccessible with this not-well-thought-out plan.
But ... I'm working on it!