What is the number of recorded pixels on the DiMAGE 7i?

I suspect 2GB is the maximum the camera will take. A 2GB Sandisk card works in my 7i. When the DiMAGE 7i was launched, 256mB was about as big as CF cards got!

go to www.memorysuppliers.com order the below item

1 SDCFB-1024-A10 - SanDisk 1GB / 1024MB Compact Flash card

You both are in luck. This sounds like a defective Sony CCD issue. Sony will fix your Minolta camera for free (with free shipping) regardless of warranty. You need to do this before March 31, 2008 so get going! See this link:
http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/news-item.pl?template_id=1&news_id=131#
The Dimage models that Sony is accepting for the recall repair are:
Dimage 7HI, 7I, A1, Xi, F300, XT, X20, S414.

It is approximately 0 to 40 degrees centigrade in temperature, and 5 to 85% in humidity.

Yes, it does. Wired remote release is capable via Remote Cord RC-1000S (1 meter) or RC-1000L (5 meters).

There are two display modes newly added for the DiMAGE 7i, grid and scale. The grid mode is to show a grid over the entire screen. This makes it easy to align the camera to objects vertically or horizontally. In the scale display mode, horizontal and vertical lines cross at the image center to divide the view to four sections, and each axis is scaled. This function is useful for close-up photography. The grid or scale on display is not recorded.

images are saved in the following format. Econ / Standard / Fine: JPEG (.jpg) Super Fine: TIFF (.tif) RAW: RAW (.mrw) Movie: Motion JPEG (.mov) Audio recording: WAVE (.wav) Symbols in brackets represent the file extension. Thumbnail data (.thm) is also saved for TIFF, Movie and RAW files.

Yes, the eye-relief is approximately 20mm from the eyepiece lens and 17.5mm form the eyepiece frame.

The ferroelectric 4.8mm (0.19 type) reflective micro LCD adopted for DiMAGE 7i's EVF has approximately 220,000 pixels.