I like Eugene's approach of trying to retrain the cow-orkers, but not much can be done about outside submissions. When I get an author's Word file with only a few graphics dropped into it, I search for ^g to find them in Word, select and copy the graphic, then switch over to Photoshop, select New File, and paste, flatten, and save it as TIFF with an appropriate name like 1-1, 1-2, etc. If there are lots of graphics and the file is in .docx format, the tip in that article works great (rename a copy of the Word file with a .zip extension and expand it).
One more tale from the trenches: Years ago (pre-.docx), I received a book ms. in Word with hundreds of screen grabs in it. When I asked the author for the original files, he said they didn't exist—he had saved his screens to the clipboard and pasted them directly into Word. I discovered that if I saved his Word file to HTML, all the screens were saved as .PNG files and placed in a links folder. That left only renaming them all into sensible filenames.
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