I'll be without my computer for at least a week. It turns out that IBM T41s have a known issue with their video cards. The heat of the board ends up screwing it up and you get a garbled screen at bootup. I'm just glad I did a backup before we left HK and Jeff did another backup of the machine last night. Argh.

More info: http://www.thinkwiki.org/Problem_with_garbled_screen