Hi Rick,
Can you post a link? You should be able to upgrade PhotoSmash through the Plugins panel and not lose any of your galleries or images. You can Deactivate and Uninstall photosmash at will without losing anything. You would have to actually go into your Database and manually delete the tables and delete the Files through FTP to get rid of it (unfortunately, there is no automatic Clean-up routines yet).
But it sounds like you may have had a change to your Theme or may have added a new plugin. Typically, the problem you describe is due to something loading jQuery improperly or the theme not having wp_footer(); in the code.
If you can post a link, we'll take a look.
Cheers,
Byron