I'm so sad and disappointed: came from France to visit NYC, my first time there, I loved it, took something like 200 pictures as, after a bad handling (too many operations in the same time), my camera was blocked ! (OLYMPUS C 350) I have no choice now but to format my 256MB XD Card or leave it !! I've tried to recover my pictures with softwares like mmCard Recovery porecovery photorec but they didn't work...
I just found out the solution after having wrote the previous message: it's a free download software: PC Inspector File Recovery and it works on every kind of drives for every kind of files
youhou ! my pictures are back ! but, overall, don't format your card before having tried it !!