I assume you mean guides and not rulers. Guides are the lines pulled out from the rulers.
If you want to delete the guides go to View > Clear Guides

My bad. It is in the Edit menu. When you first open an image they would be greyed out as there is nothing to Undo, remove from Clipboard or history. As you work on image brush strokes or cloning/healing/patches build up really fast as you can see in your History palette. Clipboard when you copy/cut anything. The Purge will no longer be greyed out. 
 
Also in Preference how much memory you are allowing Photoshop to use can be adjusted. If you have other programs open, Photoshop should be the last one to be opened for it to better analyse total memory and memory used.

I've been watching tons of video tutorials on lynda.com . I had a free month as a benefit when I registered my Adobe Design Standard CS4 suite. Going from CS to CS4 was a big jump. My brain is being filled with all the new stuff and old stuff I never knew about. Gotta say I'm loving the Rotate View tool along with the Birdseye view! Makes repairs so much easier when viewed at the right angle.

I think if you do purges more often it can help especially when doing loads of anything to do with the Brush tool.

File > Purge > Undo/Clipboard/History or better yet All. 

Not sure why I didn't think of it but I did now. Since it was all about changing file info, those TIFF images could have been selected in Bridge then go to File > File Info... Fill in or Import the metadata. Since multiple images are selected all will be updated with the new info.

Oh well, it's too late now. Something to think about if it comes up again.

It probably took a while since TIFF are quite large. But I'm sure it was faster than doing each one manually. Gotta love it. Could also Create Droplets if you do the same thing on a regular basis. Once a Droplet is created you don't even have to have Photoshop opened. You just drag and drop a folder onto the Droplet icon. Photoshop will then open if it's not already open.

You can record an action on one TIFF file opening up the File Ino window and enter your values. Then do a File > Automate > Batch on that action.

You bought Adobe Photoshop CS3 a year ago? Have you been using it? I'm curious why you have waited this long to get a "manual". I'm pretty sure the official printed Adobe Photoshop book (manual/users guide) would be a hard copy of help file PDF. I bought Adobe Standard CS4 Suite last month. The PDF for Photoshop is 29MB and is 707 pages. Not something I would want to print out. I am seriously considering getting an ebook reader like Kindle because everything seems to come with PDF files rather than a hard copy. Of course I did also buy CorelDRAW X4 last month. That came with both PDF files and a 500 page Users Guide plus a couple of other books.

You could even save it as a PSD in Photoshop then use Adobe Acrobat to create a PDF from the PSD. Vector will always make a better PDF than with raster.

It all depends on what you plan to do with the PDF file. Is it for viewing on the web or printing? I'm a CS4 virgin LOL. I went from CS to CS4 2 weeks ago. I've been going through video tutorials from lynda.com . I think the main settings would be the Adobe PDF Preset and the Compatibility. Choosing Press Quality for the Adobe PDF Preset and Acrobat 5 or higher for the Compatibility works pretty good. You don't have to fiddle around with individual settings as each preset will have it's own settings.

If you have tabbed documents you can drag a tab down. It will break it away from the tab docking area creating it's own window. You can also do the reverse. If you have all separate windows you can drag window up until it docks back as a tab.

Edit > Preferences > Interface > uncheck "Open Documents as Tabs"

That should do it if you want it to automatically open like that.

With the tabbed view you can always drag a tab to open as it's own window. Which you probably already know but new to me.

Going from CS to CS4 a week and a half ago, I've had to go through the preferences a lot.  

The Adobe package came early too. I received today and it's all installed. Install process took 35 minutes including registration. The majority of the time was for Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro and the language packs for the InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop.

4-5 hours? WOW! I got my Corel DRAW Graphics Suite X4 today. Installed, registered and I even watched the 18 videos this evening. It was suppose to arrive on 14 January. Pleasant surprise since they were both ordered yesterday. My Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Standard is suppose to arrive on 11 January. So who knows when it will arrive. I'll have to take note on how long the install process will be. Maybe a hard drink will be in order for the Adobe install LOL.

You will have to save a lot of pennies! I can't comment on the Cintiq. I still have the Wacom Graphire 4. I wouldn't be without my tablet.