Heres another release of the CSV Importer I've been working on. Again it doesn't directly support the Catalog and Manufacturers modules, but these are just Taxonomys which it does support and is the same thing really.

I have images importing and have a tricky option which lest you
* 1st define a path to look for images in
* 2nd define a column in the CSV for the image name OR a naming pattern based on one or more columns in the CSV file.
NOTE: when using the file-name-pattern it normalises all the file names by making them all lower case. So you file names have to be all lower case for this to work. If there is a filename in the image column then this overrides the file-name-pattern option. It will do a check for the existence of the file before writing it to the XML.

To make the image import work for me I had to rework the whole import code in the Importer module, which I have attached. Lyle says it works anyway so maybe give it a try as is before replacing the uc_impoter.module file with the attached one here. Basiclly I've just made it a hook call instead of inline code and insert directly into all the relevant tables myself.

Give it a go