For those of you who were at the meeting, Saturday, and know of the problem I was having installing Ubuntu 9.10 on my laptop, here is what I did to make it work.
During the disk partitioning phase of the installation, I did a manual partition making sure that each partition was a primary partition. The auto-partitioner kept making the root partition an extended partition. I haven't had time to delve into it any further as to why it would work the way I have it set up. Once that was done, the installer continued as normal and booting into the new install worked as expected.
I have not had any other problems. I have restored my home directory and some of the software I use - all is working well. If anything else comes up, I'll try to let you know.