Well, once again my dabbling in nothing-in-particular has saved the day.  Seems that Leeanne's little netbook took a tumble right off the kitchen table that we built (pics to come soon) and onto the floor, landing right on the power jack.  Now, you have to understand she does ALL of her browsing from this thing, and she tracks dozens of sites, her own two or three blogs, god knows how many passwords, etc, etc, etc.  And then it wouldn't charge.   She had just plugged it in, so the battery was mostly dead (dramatic they are, batteries....can't just stop working like everything else, they have to die) and she was starting to panic, and wondering why she hadn't used an online backup for everything she had saved on it.  I reminded her that WORST case, was we buy an expensive battery charger to get it back up and running.

We decided that the large crack in the side of the case would be a dead giveaway that the machine had been abused and would not qualify for warranty work, so we cracked it open and saw that the power jack had been knocked loose, but seemed to be in operable condition.  A little desoldering to open up some space, a little work with the iron, and VOILA, problem solved.  In the meantime she had consulted with a computer repair guy who said we should check the power plug "because it's cheap."  Cracking it open and fixing it would have cost a bit over $150 through him, which I'm sure is fair, but nearly half what we paid for the whole damned thing. 

Once again, my random skills have saved us cash and headaches.  Yay me.