You might also zap PRAM:

power on, -> immediately press and hold down the Option+Command+P+R keys until three or four startup tones are heard.

OK, thanks. I'll try those in the morning.

Booting in safe mode worked and everything is hunky dory. Thanks, all!

Funny postscript, though:

I bought Snow Leopard almost as an afterthought. I was getting Final Cut Studio via a healthy academic discount and 10.6 was available for $29, so I figured "why not?"

Well, since 10.6 was finally all set, I started to install FCS. Turns out my Mini (a 2006 model) doesn't meet the minimum VRAM requirements. The install won't run. And you can't increase VRAM on the Mini either. Some frantic googling has confirmed that my only option is to get a better Mac.

As it turns out, I can get a decent academic discount on a new Mini that has more than enough VRAM, so I'm going to use this as an excuse to get one.

I think I'll put the current one up on eBay to offset the cost. I wonder what it's worth?

I just picked up two of the new Mac Minis, they seem to be quite nice. I did immediately bump the system ram up to the full 4 GB and may eventually replace the hard drives, but for the moment they seem quite good.

Yeah, I waited for over a year for them to upgrade the Mini hardware before I got one.

I'm finally buying them again now that they have dual video outputs on them. That's a huge selling point for me.

The academic deal gets me a Mac mini 2.0GHz 4GB/320GB SuperDrive model for $749. Wooo! (basically, the standard $50 academic discount, but with an extra 2GB of RAM thrown in).

I upgraded both my Mac and my PC to Opera 10, and I really like it. It's nothing like the beta. It's fast, and it lets you have image tabs of all your windows, which is good for me, because I have 22 open now, and seeing images of them is easier identification than reading the first one or two letters of the window titles.

I've been giving a lot of presentations lately, and one of the places provided a mike, which made life easier. Any recs for a bottom end portable one I can wear and use hands free? Battery operated maybe or else a long cord, but either way some sort of harness. Speaking, don't need the quality muscicains require, and not for large crowds - 30 to 50. Large gathering than that will provide microphones normally. What price range am I looking at? Will absolute bottom end work for me, or are there some quality issues I should pay attention to? Advice would be welcome, remember I know nothing about this. Any advice including key words to google to catch stuff I would otherwise miss.

So, i was listening to music on my Mac/iTunes this morning. Then I plugged the computer into our stereo (through the headphones jack) and listened to music that way. Now, I can't hear music or any sound on my computer any more, although it does work if I plug it into the stereo.

When I try to turn the volume up/down on the computer, I get a little circle with a / through it, like there's no internal sound anymore.

I'm wondering if the new iTunes is not happy it doesn't have Snow Leopard or something?