who only by moving can balance

Can I have recs, please? I am working with two image sets. Both are taken in serpentine fashion.

In one set, I have approximately 1500 tiles total (making up five composite images), and they look something like this:



... i.e. I just want the central portion, and I want a whole bunch of not-quite-circles fishscaling in a serpentine fashion, and I REALLY don't want to have to do it all (including cropping) by hand on a per-image basis.

The second image set is only about 180 tiles (forming 12 images), and each tile looks rather more like this:



... and are arranged in serpentine fashion. I anticipate these being rather easier.

Unfortunately, Hugin chokes and dies (i.e. crashes complete with sending error reports to the mothership), and I haven't worked out why and can't be bothered to diagnose it.

For the second image set at least, the Microsoft Image Composite Editor might be useful... except that where I have files named e.g. ./BR6a-31.tif through to ./BR6a-36.tif, "New Structured Panorama" tiles them like so:

36	31	32
35	34	33

... which is making me SUPER SAD. And they have no effective manual image repositioning - HURRAH.

... any suggestions?

... please? ;_;