I took my MacBook Pro on holiday this Christmas only to find the Keyboard and touchpad had died, completely. To cut a long story short, I tried every trick in the book, but to no avail. However, I could still log in to boot camp and spent the week in Windows (how quaint!) and connected to my Mac files with MacDrive7. Apple care finally acknowledged that I'd probably had a driver failure (as opposed to a hardware failure), especially as I could still get into boot camp. My only option was to do an Archive and Install when I got home with the original Leopard disc. Just thought I'd share that one.
I guess the lesson is to always take your original discs with you, though it's good to know there's always Windows! (never thought I'd write that!).

Richard