I booted into a root shell and poked around a bit, but didn't make any definitive change to the problem. I gave her an openSUSE cd that I picked up at GHC, and last I saw her she was backing up a couple files preparatory to a full wipe and install.
Because a couple days ago, a virus hosed her Windows partition (I guess McAfee isn't perfect, lol) and (despite rancorbeast, Ben, and I fiddling with it- and replacing corrupted kernel32 and setup32 etc with uncorrupted local versions and hopefully-functional downloaded versions) she gave up on it.
Well, hell.
I, on the other hand, this morning acquired a (MSDN legal! ftw!) version and key of Windows 7 and I plan to burn it to disc and keep it handy for my inevitable needs. Maybe I'll make a VM on Ubuntu and load it there.
My Ubuntu partition (10.04) is behaving well, and I don't plan to update to 10.10 for a while yet, since this is the machine that I use all the time and I hear that there are some fun bugs that I don't really want to play with at the moment.