I ended up backing out to grub legacy earlier today even though I had been using grub2 or grub-pc for awhile. The latest update to grub-pc had a problem making grub.cfg since it couldn't find /boot/grub/locale. But then again, so far as I know nothing ever attempted to make /boot/grub/locale in the past. Since this new package just kept erroring out it was time to clear the deck and that's what I ended up doing. That also broke a linux-image installation, and I cleared the deck on the partially installed linux-image file which was back in the 2.26-286 area so I didn't feel all that bad about it.
