The Wife's machine was running out of hard disk space, so I decided to to buy her a new 500GB drive and swap it out this weekend.  The words I used to describe the process were "Easy Peasy".  Well, this was the first restore from a Time Machine backup that didn't go perfectly.  Go figure.  The Wife is incredibly fond of her MacBook as well, and she was very concerned that I'd somehow "killed him." The machine couldn't seem to boot.  Gray screen on booth with a spinner.  Boot from the OS X DVD, and run Repair on the disk, doesn't work.  Boot into safe mode.  THAT doesn't work.  Boot with verbose mode, and that seems to be hanging on the wireless driver startup.  Nothing.  Seems. To. Work. Then, I just decided to reinstall Snow Leopard, and it works.  Install the updates, and everything's back to normal.  Weird. Now the MacBook, The Wife, and myself are all happy.