I fully agree with your son - the Kodak EasyShare software is rubbish. After it died on me for the fifth time and tried to hijack my pc after every re-install I finally gave up on it.
These days I use a $10 card reader to transfer pictures, and Picasa is a good program for browsing pictures and simple editing tasks - it's is a free download from Google:
http://picasa.google.com/
I personally use ACDSee for browsing and Photoshop for editing, but these programs are not free.
You needn't worry about losing your old pictures. Everything that you've transferred so far with EasyShare is still neatly together on your computer. If you don't know where EasyShare keeps it all, you can find out by looking at the settings in EasyShare, or you can search for the pictures by hitting the Windows Start button, then Search, Files, and look for files that contain '*.jpg'.