All's well that ends well. At least I think things have ended well. Some more testing to do, but the main thing is the phone still seems to work.

So this is what I ended up doing. I wanted to install backupmenu and get everything all backed up first. After two days of fighting with unmet dependencies -- I even downloaded backupmenu-###.deb and mtd-utils-###.deb and tried to use apt-get install from terminal -- I decided oh-the-hell-with-it and gave up.

I did have the files it says you need for reflashing, but no huge confidence that I would know how to use them.

Started up the Application Manager, hit the button for kernel-power, and got told Uboot-pr13 conflicted. I don't use it for anything, so I uninstalled that, saying "Sure, fine" when it told me this was a scary thing to do.

Then it let me install the power kernel. I rebooted. And everything is there!

Major kudos to the geniuses who wrote this package and made it work so well!