Believe it or not, I am posting this from my PowerBook!
Santa must have visited overnight and sprinkled some magic dust around here.
Last night, as per the instructions over at the .MAC support page, I booted up my Mac in Single_User Mode and went into UNIX and moved over my /SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist and /com.apple.loginwindow.plist to *.old
Not something your average Mac user should ever have to do. I've used UNIX before so it wasn't a big deal to me, but if my mom had to do it, it'd be a big deal. I've still got to talk her through Repairing Disk Permissions. That really should be part of the upgrade procedure automatically, if as I hear, it's a required step before and after upgrading.
So this morning I turned on the Mac nad it booted up, so I ran MacJanitor and Repaired Disk Permissions.
Based on what I read in the .Mac forums I changed my Internet Connection from Automatic DHCP to Manual and plugged in the correct IP Address, but then the internet wouldn't work, so I had to change it back.
I'm going to rest easy and enjoy the day.
I hope everyone gets some magic dust of their own. ;-)