For those of you who doubtless wondered,
No, I'm not dead or deployed to Timbuktu. My hard drive crashed, and I've been through four days of alternately drinking and swearing, playing Halo 3, and earnestly running permissions restoration and defrags on my hard drive in the hope that it would revive.
I finally archived and reinstalled an earlier version of OSX (10.5.6) from the disk, twice, and the second attempt took. I was ten minutes away from burning the whole thing down and installing from a blank disk in the hope that that would get it (still might need to soon; there is a damaged sector that used to be part of my root directory) but at least I'm up to limping along well enough to back everything up so it'll only take me seven or eight hours instead of two days (or more) to recoup my losses. And of course, however long it'll take to get an RMA and replace my hard drive, which has got to still be under warranty, as it's less than 2 years old.
I finally archived and reinstalled an earlier version of OSX (10.5.6) from the disk, twice, and the second attempt took. I was ten minutes away from burning the whole thing down and installing from a blank disk in the hope that that would get it (still might need to soon; there is a damaged sector that used to be part of my root directory) but at least I'm up to limping along well enough to back everything up so it'll only take me seven or eight hours instead of two days (or more) to recoup my losses. And of course, however long it'll take to get an RMA and replace my hard drive, which has got to still be under warranty, as it's less than 2 years old.