PowerPoint 2013: Images in presentation disappear - and are replaced with 'The image part with relationship ID rId2 was not found in the file'

Same issues here.  For what it's worth, this has been happening with multiple presentations on a Dell Latitude E4310, Win7 64 bit, 8GB RAM.  Upgraded the user to a ThinkPad T431S and it's happening still with the same presentations as well as new ones.

I am having exactly the same problems you describe, both with images disappearing and with the file save problem.  I hate to think of the hours of productivity people are losing over this.  Why has it not been solved when the issues began months ago?  How often are we going to have to reboot?

I experienced the loss of graphics from PowerPoint 2013 for the first time yesterday (9/29/2013). I run Window 7 Pro on a Lenovo X201 laptop. I upgraded to from Office 2010 to Office 365 about a month ago. The problem follows the same pattern reported in these posts:

The first symptom appears to be a warning that the open PowerPoint file cannot be saved because it is read only.

Two of my PowerPoint files have been affected. In one case the images in the background template disappeared. In the other file, all of my images (other than embedded charts and tables created in PowerPoint) disappeared.

This was disastrous this morning as I attempted start a team working on $22 million project -- but with the ability to show the team key information about the project missing from the slides.

I will try the following work-arounds: saving in an older file format and/or discontinuing PowerPoint 2013 use and returning to using 2010.

There are surely folks at Microsoft that realize that many users aren't interested in software, only the functionality that software provides. Until Microsoft can assure the reliability and functionality of PowerPoint 2013, it is too risky for business to use it.

I've been dealing with this for a few weeks now and have a little more clarity.  Here's what I can tell that might help someone else survive, and/or might help MS to diagnose the problem:

A. It has something to do with things related to file size and memory usage.

I started seeing it on a very large presentation with a lot of graphics, one that was around 1.8MB when saved as .pptx and became about 4.6MB when saved as .ppt.  I've also had it happen on a presentation that I was working on that was smaller, but that one only had the problem when I had a larger one open in the background - even though at the time I wasn't having the issue with the larger one at the time.   

The Fix:  I only open what I'm working on, I don't leave other presentations open in the background

B. It happens regardless of whether I save as .ppt or .pptx, but it's only recoverable with .ppt.

The beginning sequence is the same:  I press save, and I get an error that another user is accessing the file (words to that effect) so my only choice is to save as a new version.  The fork in the road is, when saving as .ppt I've never had a failure in the 'save as' process - the document stays whole, and I just end up with a lot of revisions and then do some file cleanup.  But when saving as .pptx, about every 2nd/3rd time, when I save as, the images are corrupt or gone or unreferenced - and, the file size shrinks substantially.  That equates to lost work as I have to go back one rev and start over.

The Fix:  I save everything as .ppt now, especially larger files

When I say "the fix" above, I mean "the workaround."  We are a business and this is a primary tool.  I'm about ready to downgrade and blog publicly an account of my experiences with 2013.  Also, I reject the notion that a fix involves changing the format of images already in presentations that I've used for years with prior, functioning versions of powerpoint.  The fix is to make this version work like the others.

Hope that helps someone.