Info for anyone who needs it.
I installed picassa in its own win XP bottle, everything seemed to work good. I installed the mozilla active x control, connectivity still was problematic especially when trying to send from my gmail account. Sending with my regular email program did open evolution and worked fine.
All the picture editing features work well and that is why I use Picassa. Connectivity does not matter so much to me F-Spot can upload to picassa and works well enough for most of my needs anyway.
Cheers