Thanks for the help. Turned out to be a BIOS problem... Vista could not find the proper IDE channel to assign to my SATA hard drive. I fiddled with the the SATA settings in the boot priority list and it "cured" itself.
My installation seems to be fine, but I was not at the console for some of the installation. Now my computer won't boot unless the installation DVD is in the drive. Did I miss something during the installation process -- and is there a way to correct the problem without re-installing from...