In case anyone wonders (or cares), I ran DiskWarrior last night, and after twelve hours (!) of repair, my machine came back behaving much more nicely. At the very least, I could once again use the Finder. I also ran the Disk Permissions Repair.
Unfortunately, the fonts are still all missing from the system, and no amount of dragging them into and out of the Fonts folder makes any difference, sigh. Everything is *much* more speedy when running with just the ten default system fonts, however--300+ installed fonts seems to really bog things down. It's the price you pay for having a professional designer as a spouse... Time to haul out a small fortune of DVDs (but not quite enough to justify buying another FireWire disk, alas) to make backups before reinstalling, I think. The only truly annoying part of this is the number of shareware apps I have which do *not* send their registrations via email. Once I clear the disk, I'm going to lose the registration keys, unless I find the patience to track down where every one of these apps store them. There does not seem to be a clear pattern in the first few I've looked at. *grumble* Oh, and installing Perl 5.8 again and all its modules so that it can run peacefully with the default 5.6.1 (and all *its* modules) is going to be a chore, too. Ah well, I came to OS X as sort of a Linux refugee. I guess I'm trading off the immense amount of time you can spend fixing Linux problems for the fact that on a proprietary OS you sometimes *can't* fix all your problems.... Trey
